Time to get back into the cockpit for more of our diverse heroes and the kingdom of terrible writing.
And I do fucking mean
terrible writing.
Sam wakes up, being kicked by the girl with one leg and who uses a wheelchair "looming over him." We also learn that apparently Sam once wrecked Lianna's Porsche. She says Porch, but given this game's obsession with terrible writing techniques I'm left having to guess. Apologies. We then are treated to fucking.... This:
Let's pause for a brief moment and establish
what this is fucking implying. Up until this point, no one has been established as being killed, with the dreaded HAT FASH going so far as to survive to swear vengeance. In this one scene, however, Lianna is implying that
the Fash in the previous fights were flat-out fucking murdered by our protagonists. This means the first fight, which was entirely the fault of fucking Jason,
led to Sam fucking murdering someone over a drunken bar fight, and, even more horrifyingly, the second fight, in which Lianna fucking escalated,
resulted in multiple deaths entirely over her being an asshole.
Lianna is a straight-up psychopath and just graduated to being completely irredeemable. Making it even more disturbing, however, Lianna basically dragged everyone remotely involved with this into being an accessory to her crimes and trying to justify it with a
JUST DOING WHAT WE HAD TO DO-ism. At this point, in-universe, the Fash have not done anything
remotely on-par with the fact that
the protagonists have killed around seven people so far, mostly for being assholes, and are making perfectly clear that
they are willing to kill again over it.
Congratulations, you have officially made protagonists that are more villainous than their opponents, Heather Flowers.
Also
take a penalty shot and press
for our murdered meatmech not-the-real-antagonists-of-this-game:
Another meatmech section, this one with no buildup other than Brad "taking point." We don't have any confirmation that the meatmechs in the desert are Fash, or some rogue element because the game never tells us. This section, however, is bullshit. You know how the previous area had you in fights that were basically impossible to lose? This section takes the opposite approach and it's not Brad's fault. In fact Brad may be the best defensive character in the game, since his unique ability is the what I refer to as the YEET KICK. It stuns brad instantly to use, but hurls his opponent about halfway across the screen, which means if you have a clear vector and land the hit, the enemy's gone.
I also want to take the opportunity to give praise where it's due, the fight theme in this area is a good tune. Props to whoever made it.
Unfortunately this game's got major problems exemplified by this section, so let's get right into it.
The problem comes in in that not only do you start with a massive disadvantage and usually an enemy mech right in your face, but the game throws 2V1 against you, and the game sees fit to give them basically every useful ability. Every single one of these guys has Sam's fast-move, a version of Brad's YEET KICK that
doesn't stun them, and about half of them also possess Lilianna's red punch, which actually may be the biggest problem, since rather than induce stun, it induces crush. Crush completely shuts off your offense and abilities for the duration, and is on a timer independent from stun. So you can be given both at once, and the enemy can beat the tobacco juice out of you basically forever in the corner and you can't ever escape.
The enemies can hit one another, too, and this is not an advantage, even though they can by all accounts Stun/Crush their teammates. They can smash one of their buddies right back at you if you knock one away, which can result in you YEET KICK-ing a pair of enemies (and stunning yourself) only to, mid-flight, one of the two enemies you sent reeling YEET KICK-ing his buddy right back at you (which does
not stun him), and now you're getting your ass beaten while you're stunned, usually to suffer crush again.
Oh, but we're not at the most bullshit design decision, yet. Not by a landslide.
See, while all this is going on, the more you get hit, the harder the Mech becomes to control, until it becomes almost impossible to steer. It goes from handling logically to handling like a truck with bad steering carrying an oversized load while the driver is drunk, and while this is happening, the game decides to sneak in another little bit of bullshit - the more you get hit,
the more your hit priority goes down. Also this never wears off for the section you're in. So if you get your shit punched in at the first segment of a mech level, the rest of the segment will have you in drunken Irishman mode.
What this effectively means is that fights can literally become unwinnable in one of three ways, all exemplified by this area: You can get pushed off (logically), you can get beaten endlessly until your controls and ability to do anything are so fucking bad that you can barely move or attack, or you can be smashed against a wall and completely unable to escape a 2v1.
And only two of these mutually exclusive, so they can happen together!
Your average chapter in
Extreme Meatpunks Forever takes about 7 minutes, give or take, counting the fight scene. This one fight segment took me forty minutes. There is a reason that this game includes the ability to skip the fucking fights. It is not, contrary to what the developer claims, so you can "get back to the story." It's because the fight mechanics are fundamentally broken due to the aforementioned nonsense above.
I refused to skip any of these fights, both because it's the only amount of actual gameplay in this, and because I'm a spiteful asshole who is never going to let bad game design like this slide. No guesses as to what a later episode of
Why EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER Doesn't Work will be about. I have something....
Special for today's once we get there.
The game gives us the choice of sticking with Cass and Sam or Lianna and Brad. I fucking despise Lianna, so Sam and Cass win.
....That's a fucking environment right there.
....Aigis, would you kindly?
Thank you, dear.
She's not wrong.
.....I don't even know what's going on.
..................
.....Moving on.
Brad then intervenes and says that they found a youth pastor and asks if they can keep it.
Lianna then says - and I swear to god, I am not making this up: "
If he's a problem, we can just kill him."
Irredeemably evil to complete
fucking monster in a single chapter. That's fucking
talent.
Lianna's willingness to fucking murder people immediately draws the suspicion of the clerk, who asks if they're on the run from the cops. Is there fucking
anything likable about this character?
This is Ed. Ed believes in you and wants you to Praise the Sun. That is all.
Cass gets to take a turn.
Ironically, Cass is one of the best characters. She gets crush like Lianna, and her secondary lets her stop all momentum, so she can stop herself from being launched. Best of all is her passive, which makes her mech stronger the more fucked up you are. Cass is the closest thing to a "win the game" button so far and the fact that she's probably the most moderated character makes her even more tolerable.
Unfortunately, the game is done fucking around and it throws 3v1s and Giant Enemies at you.
The Giant enemies are like the normal ones, except they are launched half as far and throw you twice as far.
It's not enough, Cass is the best character because of her stat leverage. The mech segment takes about a minute and change.
We're about to get into a fucking amazing segment. No, really.
All right. Ignore that Brad just diversity checkboxed again and is thus Autistic, trans,
and possibly retarded while also being one of the game's more likable characters because literally
everyone is likable in front of Lianna, especially the antagonists, but Brad is sick of Lianna constantly treating him as a fucking purse puppy, and if there's anyone who deserves a kick in the cunt at this point, it's Lianna, who has literally made everything in this game worse since we began. You have the choice to be diplomatic or to fly off the handle, and since Lianna is already reprehensible, let's go with that.
Oh my god. Every single time I've reached the apex of how unlikable she is, she breaks new ground. You're given the choice of reacting in kind with Brad or trying to de-escalate, and it's hard to say which pisses me off less. I go with attempting to de-escalate, at which point Lianna takes Brad's "let's take a step back" as a fucking trigger and goes off on Brad.
At which point Brad says what we're all thinking:
God bless you, Brad. But the games' not done.
We're
seriously doing this.
OK, game. No. You
do not get the ability to get away with this.
Lianna is a fucking terrible person, and every one of these justifications fall completely flat.
That she has the most fighting experience doesn't matter when she's fought exactly
once since the game began. Cass, an introvert, doesn't like to deal with her because Lianna is a domineering asshole who has pathologically gotten them in trouble since the game started. Sam hates her for plot reasons that the game may or may not get into at some point. Brad hates her because she's a patronizing dickhead. No one listens to her because she's out-of-touch, angry, violent, callous, short-sighted, stupid, and casually wants to murder people.
Perhaps most tellingly of all, Lianna is very clearly the author self-insert.... And then the game gives us this:
......This is
real, right? I'm not having another violent, Brianna Wu-induced hallucination?
Excuse me a second:
We've reached the point where the bad writing for Lianna has officially circled right around and smacked the dev about being a shitty writer, and without them even realizing they just fisted themselves. This is fucking
magical. This shit right here? People, this shit is the reason I continue to torture myself with these games. How many fucking games can even
try to intentionally fuck their narratives up to the point where they openly excoriate their own bad character writing by accident?
And this game's going
to the fucking moon.
Realistically, Brad is outmatched here.
But for the sake of this game,
I am going to do fucking everything to ensure he wins.
Also,
take a penalty shot because the enemies in the desert were never identified as Fash but our heroes beat the snot out of them anyway.
Good god am I glad this one's over.
In today's episode of
Why EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER Does Not Work, we're going directly to the heart of the matter with our protagonists. We have several right now, and we're going to go over each of them in a bit of detail before doing a bit of an evaluation.
First, we have Sam. Sam is the quiet one and the most grounded, and really hasn't done or said anything that has pissed me off, which is a plus. The problem Sam has is that he's completely reactive. He gets involved because of Jason being a drunken tard, may or may not have killed someone, and is effectively shanghai'd into helping Lianna and the others after Lianna escalates in Chapter 2. This, so far, is the extent of his characterization, despite ostensibly being the main character.
Second, we have Cass. Cass is mopey, and a genderspecial, but Cass is probably the most down-to-earth of the bunch and acts as a moderating force. Despite the fact that Cass's insistence on lowercase is absolutely infuriating, Cass is surprisingly relatable and for the most part is the one who breaks up shit by simple virtue of injecting her own brand of "I don't even know what the fuck is going on, but it needs to stop" into things. Cass is one of the only characters that is proactive, often intentionally taking steps to de-escalate scenarios and push things along, which is refreshing.
Third, we have Brad. Brad's a walking diversity checkbox and his dialogue makes me want to find a dark corner and someone to pummel, but Brad is, ironically, the most developed character as of chapter 3. He's kind, well-meaning, oddly likable for being an idiot, and he's the one who finally up and puts Lianna in her place when she finally goes too far with her shit. Whatever my problems are with Brad's dialogue and Tumblritis, Brad as a
character thus far is fine. He's reactive, but in the bad way.
And finally, we have Lianna, who is a fucking lead weight on the cast, dragging everyone else down. Everything bad that has happened in this plot so far can be put directly on her head. She was the one who started the meatmech fight club. She is the one who escalated when the Fash Collective members went looking for trouble, and she is the one who basically forced everyone into the long death-march they are currently on and now talks casually about murdering people. The background material makes clear she stole from the shop she and Cass worked at. This is a fucking awful person, who has justified none of her actions and is infinitely more villainous than the setting's purported antagonists, and while
being an awful person does not preclude one from being an interesting protagonist, it
does mean that a character who is this way and supposed to be somehow relatable is going to fail. At no point does she even
try to justify her behavior, and to all observation everything bad that happens to the group because of her actions is entirely on her. Yet the game pretends this isn't the case.
What you can quickly put together from this is that most of the game's characters are reactive, and that most of them are only good because the antagonist force is a thinly-veiled reference to THE MOTHERFUCKING NAZIS as understood by a 8-year-old that uses Twitter, and that the main reason the characters are likable are because Jason was insufferable and Lianna is quite literally one of the worst characters I've covered on this Let's Sperg series. Let's go over an old writing lesson: unless it's specifically relevant to the plot in some capacity or another, a character's gender identity or sexuality is not as important as their role in a story, and while you can absolutely make stories about that kind of thing, or incorporate them into a narrative, they'll come across as hackneyed and pandering if you fail to use them well, and as discussed in the earlier discussion of the antagonists of this game, that is a bygone conclusion.
Would you guess, by their interactions, that the bulk of the cast is in their late 20s to mid-30s?
Cass and Lianna are 35. Sam is 25. Brad is 27. None of the characters act their ages, or have anything about them that reflects this. Did you also know that
the characters are intentionally uglified because it's what artists the developer is friends with wanted? You do now.
It gets bitter and more cynical. Every single one of the characters checks multiple diversity checkboxes, and for no other reason than to pander to the dev's Twitter audience. While this may be very good for people that think there's no such thing as too much diversity, in reality, they've created a cast where 100% of the characters are impossible to believe and aren't properly humanized. I'm sure that the dev's vision of 100% of the cast being trans/gender-non-conforming/gay is the peak and pride of character development, but it utterly quashes suspension of disbelief.
The end result of this is, ironically, a black mirror of what Twitter users think a soulless corporate production is: A game where 100% of the characterization is done by community, to appeal to a focus test group, that is completely out-of-touch with what an audience wants and ultimately tells a worse story because of it. They went and made their own game, focusing entirely on trying to avoid the pitfalls of the corporate world, only to make those same mistakes, with even less elegance.
So how can we fix this? We really can't at this point, at best we can hope that Lianna gets axed from the team and the team as a whole is better off without her. However, since she
is the author self-insert, I have doubts this is going to happen. If I
was to suggest a way to fix this, it would be going back to square one and scrap everything. We start with our cast and we give them actually definable character traits that aren't based solely on what Twitter thinks is relevant. You focus not on their gender identities, or what they want to fuck, or their disabilities or mental problems, but on their personal struggles. Establish their good and bad points. Establish their goals, and what they're willing to do for those goals. Set up how each character reacts to things. Some characters will stick to a personal moral code and others will do anything they have to. The only time their gender identity or sexual preference matters at all, aside from a blurb in a bio, is when its relevant to the story. Focus on making a good character first, and everything else will fall into place on its own.
Next chapter soon.
Shots Taken: 4
