How to be Funny

OK, so my review title is misleading. Despite being a game that is very clearly about comedy, this game is not and does not attempt to be funny. That's fine and interesting, and the bizarre plot is actually well done enough that I enjoyed it.

You fight skeletal SNL alumni, movie references and old internet memes (but not actual old memes, just... random RTP fishmen named something like Outdated Meme) as you fight through a ruined hellscape of a "comedy" dungeon put together by an alien who very clearly does not understand comedy. And that's the joke. He thinks he's surpassed human limitations and mastered the art of comedy, but he's about as funny as a math test.

There are LAUGH TRACKS in this game, and it is fantastic.

Unfortunately, the enjoyable - if simultaneously somewhat horrifying - comedy tour is spread out across several hours of nauseating gameplay. There is no semblance of game balance here, no enjoyment to progression. The battles are as bad as the jokes. Enemies will randomly crit you for your max HP, or stun/confuse/paralyze your entire party for 20 rounds, and there's nothing at all you can do about it. Attack skills are mostly useless, several of them costing MP but being worse than a normal attack. Later you get a skill that makes you invincible for three rounds and can be used every three rounds, so the only thing that can hurt you is status effects. But then you'll get hit with a status effect and, whoops, game over.

I was forced to quit when a boss finally paralyzed my entire party at the beginning of round 1, and they stayed paralyzed for the entire battle until I died. There was no way to recover. There wasn't even a piece of paralysis immunity armor, which would have pissed me off because it would have still forced me to get a game over once to learn I needed it, but would have at least allowed me to continue. Sigh. The boss simply cannot be killed if it uses that attack and the attack hits both of your party members. This is how not to make battles.

Aside from being unbalanced, I felt like a lot more could have been done with the skills. One character is a black mage who uses fire/ice/lightning attacks and the other is a white mage who uses standard healing spells. Is this appropriate for this kind of game? Shouldn't the elements be, like, different types of humor, or different types of things that stop humor, or something? You're literally fighting jokes, shouldn't the gameplay revolve around that? The equipment was sort of similar though a little better, in that it had clever use of equipment slots and item names, but still gave attack/defense/magic/agility. It was just sort of unimpressive and dull. Renaming Spin Fist to Punchline doesn't make "comedy battles". There was an opportunity here for actual joke-based gameplay, and it was wasted.

Maybe I just didn't get the punch line.

The dungeons themselves were not completely bad. They were very aesthetically nice when taken individually, that's for sure. I'm not entirely sure what was going on with them, though. Supposedly the environment was an artificial construct created by the alien because he thought it was funny, which I guess is meant to be a threadbare excuse for why there's no cohesion or point to any of it. It's just random maps made from random RTP tilesets. An ice cave leading to a ruined house leading to a temple. My least favorite type of mapping: the type where nothing has any relation to the game. I'm not sure why the game doesn't take place in, like, an alien ship, or the set of a sitcom, or the ruins of Broadway in 2300 AD, or something.


In summary:
Instead of game, download contained live panther which mauled and hospitalized me. Would not download again. 1.5 / 5 stars.