LISA: THE PAINFUL RPG (2024)

LISA: The Painful RPG, or alternatively LISA: The Painful and/or just LISA, is the sequel to LISA: The First. It is the journey of Brad Armstrong, attempting to save his adopted daughter, Buddy, the last female in Olathe after being kidnapped.

The game was released on December 15, 2014. It can be purchased from Steam.

The story is loosely based on the 1992 novel The Children of Men.

Main Characters[]

Brad Armstrong[]

Brad is the main protagonist of the game. He's a middle aged, drug addict man who is haunted by the memories of his deceased sister, Lisa. Fate lands him along a melancholic and violent journey through the pervert-infested post-apocalyptic land of Olathe in search of his adoptive daughter, Buddy.

Buddy[]

She was a lone baby of unknown origin crying in the middle of nowhere, near Brad's hut.

Lisa Armstrong[]

Lisa was Brad's younger sister. Being unable to cope with the physical and sexual abuse of her father, she committed suicide by hanging herself. Brad is haunted by visions of her throughout the game, and adopted Buddy to cope with the guilt from Lisa's death. She was the protagonist of the previous exploration game, LISA: THE FIRST.

Buzzo[]

Buzzo is one of the major antagonists on the game. Shrouded in mystery, Buzzo appears as a rather young man full of anger and power. He seems to be directly involved with the strange drug known as Joy.

His interaction with the player is by subjecting Brad to ultimatum decisions that put his friends lives, belongings or even his limbs at risk. His motives are unknown. Other than that, he's a Joyful Boy.

Rando[]

Rando is another mysterious and powerful man in the land of Olathe. Covering his face with a Red Skull Mask and his body with a large ominous black tunic, the leader of the Rando Army unnerves his enemies and subordinates with his sole prescence. Yet still, he doesn't seem what he looks like, as he is oddly sensitive and calm.

Story[]

The events of LISA: The Painful RPG are set in the aforementioned land of Olathe, a post-Apocalyptic area now inhabited by mostly men after "the flash" had wiped out all the women in the world.

The game starts in the past by showing us Brad and his friends as children being beaten up by Chris Columbo and his gang because Rick, Sticky or Cheeks took Chris' ball. Brad assumes the responsibility on this, and he takes the rest of the beating on himself.

After Chris and his gang leave, Brad goes back home. His place looks dirtier and directly contrasts the rest of the homes in the neighborhood. Once he enters his house, he is berated and yelled at by his father, Marty, for ripping his shirt. He then goes upstairs and cries to himself in his room.

Once the game starts, we see the present-day status of Brad- depressed, addicted to joy, and lonely. One day, Brad finds a baby left in the middle of the wastelands in Olathe. After picking it up, subsequently dropping it, and bringing it back to his house where he lives with his aforementioned friends, he reveals that the baby is a girl. While his friends urge him to give her to Rando, the leader of the most powerful gang in Olathe, Brad refuses, deciding to take her in as his own daughter, naming her Buddy.

A sequence of scenes plays showing Buddy as she grows up as Brad struggles with visions of his abusive father and his own addiction to Joy. At one point while Brad is on joy, we see a scene of Buddy trying to go outside the house only to get brought back by Brad. Brad, seeing how upset his consumption of joy has made Buddy, throws his remaining joy away. He makes Buddy a mask to wear so she can go outside finally. He and his friends are seen trying to be better for Buddy, allowing her to paint their faces and play with them.

After struggling with withdrawal, Brad returns to joy and decides to take it again, breaking his sobriety.

Then, we are introduced to the infamous Terry Hintz. After saving Terry from being stuck in a tree by fighting a dog named Cheese Legs, we gain Terry as part of the team. Once Brad goes back to his house, however, he sees his friend beaten and bloody in front of their house who tells him that Buddy was gone.

This is the start of the main journey- Brad decides that he needs to find Buddy and begins his journey across Olathe to find her. Along the way, we meet a plethora of characters that we can add to the party, gaining more compatriots and learning more about the land as we go.

Brad fights through the land of Olathe, fighting not only gangs, random assailants, but also many different joy mutants- a type of monster created by an overuse of the drug joy. Through this, Brad faces many hard decisions at different times, many of which including losing his arms, losing his items, or even losing his teammates.

!!SPOILERS FOR THE END OF THE GAME AHEAD!!

Nearing the end of the game, Brad finds Buddy once more and goes to take her home even after realizing that Buddy had left of her own accord due to his overcontrolling behavior. However, as they leave, Brad is knocked out by Buzzo's gang, and is then forced to take large amounts of joy by Buzzo right in front of Buddy. After passing out and waking up to find Buddy gone, Brad sets out to build a boat and follow her across the sea where she escaped.

After creating the boat, abandoning his party, and killing Shardy Hernandez (the boat captain,) he finds Buddy in a cave being cared for by his abusive father, Marty. You then have the option to spare Marty or attack him, but either option leads to a fight with Marty Armstrong. Buddy attempts to protect Marty but fails- Brad eventually beats him to a pulp, leaving nothing but a red stain behind and promptly blacks out again.

Brad follows Buddy over the water again, now using the body of Shardy as a raft, and finds the father of his childhood friend, Sticky, Mr. Angoneli. Brad proceeds to kill Mr. Angoneli after he "brands" Buddy's face with his blades and threatens to assault her. Brad attempts to console Buddy but is pushed away as she runs off into Rando's armies to hide.

Brad's previous party members then arrive to try to help Brad, but he is so dead set on getting Buddy back on his own that he attacks and kills the three of them, no matter who was in your party. Depending on who was present in your main party before you abandoned them, however, will lead to slightly different notes during the fight- some members will be sad about having to fight you while others will be happy to attack you right then and there. After killing your former friends, Brad battles the forces in Rando's army and completely wipes them out, emerging bloody and covered in wounds and arrows.

He then tries to convince Buddy to come back with him and that he was doing the right thing, but Buddy shares her true feelings with him- berating him for his overprotective nature and the way that he didn't listen to her requests. Brad, seemingly bleeding out and dying, makes one final request of Buddy- to hold him one last time. You, as the player, get to make this decision whether Buddy does hug Brad or refuses to. Brad then asks if he did the right thing and subsequently collapses, seemingly dead.

The final scene differs slightly depending on what mode you ran the game in (painful, regular, or easy) and if you took joy willingly throughout the game, but no matter what, Brad will always turn into a joy mutant in the end.

Beta Content[]

Rando possibly played more of a friendly role in past iterations.

Previous Party member designs, note how some were combined or re-purposed.

Many different locations and characters are seen in Alpha trailer.

Trivia[]

• A consequence of the game's development being mostly open and taking place over two years is that a lot of story and gameplay elements ended up dropped during production:
  • Rick, Sticky and Cheeks were all at one point recruitable party members, and Rick and Sticky still have unused battle sprites and animations in the game code.
  • Early gameplay trailers hinted at a completely different main plot, with Buddy asking Brad and the uncles about a mission of revenge.
  • Columbo has enemy battle data in the final game code and an unused battle theme in the soundtrack, but isn't fought in the game proper.
  • An earlyteaser image◊shows sprites for multiple party members and characters, a few of which go unused.
  • A gameplay feature that ended up being cut for time was specific side quests for different party members, in the end Bo was the only one who ended up with his own side quest, searching for his lost brother.
  • A minor change, but an earlyteaser shot◊of the Salvation Rangers implied that Dick was actually yellow.
  • There were initially supposed to be ten Kickstarter backer characters, but four of them fell through for one reason or another, and the game only ended up with six (Beastborn, Garth, RT, Yazan, Jack and Sonny).
  • The game was initially titled "The Last Matador", and interviews with Austin Jorgensen imply that it was not originally connected with Lisa: The First until well into development.
    • In fact, Austin's original concept for this game was aFist of the North Startype setting in which a bunch of ripped dudes beat eachother up, then he started to get into the deeper aspects of a world without any women.
  • Thepre-alpha gameplay footageshows a lot of things that didn't make it into the game. Aside from the aforementioned Ricky and Cheeks as party members, the trailer also shows them having a team attack that implies that moves can be done with certain party members in the same party, a party member named Hawk that is nowhere to be found in the final game, a sneaking mechanic, proper battle backgrounds instead of the in-engine generated ones, and more blatant foreshadowing ofDr. Yado.
  • Austin Jorgensen had mentioned in interviews that he originally wanted to put several reference characters in LISA (mentioning the USA Sports Team fromThe King of Fightersspecifically), and sprites for quite a few of them do exist in the spritesheet, but in the end none made the cut save forExpiesof Lucas, the Mario Bros. and a palette-swapped Everdred.
  • Austin also stated that Rando wasoriginally going to be a biological son of Brad'sand that Hawk was going to compete with Brad to gain Rando's trust, and eventually control the Rando Army. This subplot was scrapped but aDummied Outsprite references it.