This is the second installment of Game Cred: a collection of essays about video games to tie in with our latest Zine.
Content warning: this piece discusses child abuse, substance abuse, and sexual assault. This piece also contains spoilers for The LISA trilogy.
The LISA trilogy of games was developed by Austin Jorgensen, AKA Dingaling Productions. The games follow a series of characters, beginning with Lisa, as her trauma and then suicide affects those around her. The first game concerns itself with Lisa’s mental state, while the next two show the causal effects of her suicide on related characters in a post-apocalyptic world without women. The series was developed with RPG Maker, an easily accessible, consumer-grade programming software for the creation of JRPG style games. The first game, retroactively titled LISA: The First after the release of the sequels, is a Yume Nikki–style adventure game set in the world of dreams. This style of game doesn’t focus on combat, instead focusing on exploration that is reflective of the character’s mental state and puzzle solving. The subsequent two titles, LISA: The Painful and LISA: The Joyful instead opt for an Earthbound style RPG system. At first blush, they are quirky-looking, interesting games. Beyond this exterior runs a deeper undercurrent of pain, failed masculinity, generational trauma, and causal effect.
I first played The Painful when my youngest son was born, and the issues presented and commented on by the game struck me deeply. The fears of a young father resonate with a lot of the issues in the game. Namely, realizing you weren’t as good a father as you thought you were. After that, I immediately sought out The First and played The Joyful (twice) on the day of release. All of this adds up to make one of the most powerful experiences in gaming, and one that is still unmatched in my subsequent years of playing games.
LISA: THE FIRST – CAUSAL RIPPLES
The first game in the series is much shorter than the rest, and plays completely differently. You play as the titular Lisa Armstrong, who is attempting to escape the house of her abusive father, Marty Armstrong. The plot, although sparse and abstract, is important to the remaining series since it sets up context for future events and also is the catalyst for everything that happens afterwards.
The game is set within the mind of Lisa as she attempts to escape internally from the physical and sexual abuse she suffers. This is literalized by her being locked in her room, with Marty never allowing her to leave. Over the course of the game, the different areas of her subconscious are filled with various forms of Marty, vacillating between smug, loving, and terrifying. The only other character present is Tricky Rick, a phallic-looking character who speaks in double-entendres. Tricky Rick is the physical manifestation of Marty’s abuse of Lisa. Further into the game, the environments grow more sinister and disgusting, covered in vomit and other fluids.
A secret ending has Lisa confronting her mother, only for the mother to turn around and appear to be another Marty. This reflects how much Marty has traumatized Lisa, since he has overtaken all of her memories and thoughts. Lisa’s trauma response sets off the series of events and interpersonal relationships that the rest of the game examines, and she serves as the most important character in the series, despite her physical absence in later games.
LISA: THE PAINFUL – FAILURE AND PROJECTION
The Painful begins decades after The First. The title screen depicts Lisa hanging from a noose, filling in her fate in between the games. Once started, the game shows a child protecting his friends by taking a beating for them. The child’s name is Brad Armstrong. He returns home beaten and bruised only to be assaulted by his father: Marty. The game quickly makes us aware that Brad is Lisa’s brother. His absence in the previous game could be because he never helped or hurt his sister, so he wasn’t reflected in her thoughts.
Flash forward to decades later, after a mysterious Flash that caused all women to disappear, leaving only the men who have turned the world of Olathe into a desolate wasteland. At this point Brad, our player-character, is fully grown and addicted to a new drug called Joy. One morning, he finds a baby in a valley and, to his surprise, the baby is female. Brad decides to protect her and names her Buddy before taking her home.
Cue a montage of him raising her, both good times and bad. Brad does what he thinks is best, but at the cost of leaving Buddy locked in the house. This reflects Marty’s sequestering of Lisa, although Brad never harms Buddy. Brad kicks his Joy addiction until he hurts Buddy’s feelings, causing him to relocate his stash. After waking up from his bender, Buddy is missing, and most of Brad’s friends are dead. This sets up the main narrative and pushes Brad into the hero’s adventure. The different factions of Olathe all want Buddy for their own purposes, and Brad is desperate to take her back home, attempting to atone for failing his sister.
LISA: THE PAINFUL – LUDONARRATIVE COHERENCE
From here, we get our first taste of how the gameplay locks into the themes of the game. Throughout the game, Brad has to make choices between sacrificing exterior items like party members or usable items, or giving up part of his own body. Giving up parts of the body are felt through gameplay aspects: they lower Brad’s stats (he’s easily the most powerful party member in the game) and remove moves from his combo mechanic. If both arms are lost, the combo system is lost entirely and Brad is only left with a bite attack and a handful of weaker special moves. Conversely, party members and items are rare and usually come from hard-fought battles.
The pain and trauma from choices is almost like a skewed version of penance for Brad failing to decide whether or not to help his sister. This is made most evident by the main antagonist of these choices: Buzzo. Buzzo was Lisa’s best friend (and potentially boyfriend) who decided to punish all those involved after Lisa’s suicide. He shows up at itermittant points in the plot to taunt and torture Brad, trying to reveal the monster he sees Brad as in his mind. It is also heavily implied that Buzzo is who started Brad on Joy, making him the man he is today.
This leads to another gameplay ‘feature,’ Brad’s Joy addiction. Occasionally, he will go into withdrawal and his moves will do much less damage than they would usually. This can be alleviated either by time or taking more Joy. The more Joy Brad takes, the more he goes into withdrawal. Also, the more limbs that Brad loses the more the pain causes him to crave Joy. All of these gameplay systems interlock to show the difficulty of choice and allow the player into the mindset of Brad himself. Every choice is a bad one, and all roads lead back to Joy and Lisa. The Joy eventually causes hallucinations of memories, traumas and Lisa herself. She will overlook difficult scenes and seems to preempt hard times. The game does incentivize the player to never take Joy, as it unlocks an alternate stinger scene after the cutscenes (to be discussed later).
It is learned through gameplay and narrative that anyone who takes Joy eventually ends up being a Joy mutant. The mutants are dangerously unpredictable and frequently violent. However, it is seen that some are passive and it is implied that they only exist to follow a single-minded focus on what the person before the change wanted. This is in the back of the player’s mind every time they take Joy: that will be Brad someday.
This all adds up to a game that succeeds at ludonarrative coherence. The Painful’s story and gameplay interlock in such a way that makes the experience much more immersive than it would be otherwise. Jorgenson has managed to stitch the gameplay and narrative together so closely that it becomes impossible for the first-time player to not identify with Brad’s plight. This ups the emotional stakes of the player and, honestly, makes the game very difficult to put down. This connection to Brad also makes the player question some of his choices (the ones beyond your control) and hope that Brad can eventually be happy.
The last gameplay mechanic that I want to talk about really drives home how dangerous the world of Olathe can be: perma-death. There are certain events or dangerous enemies that can definitively kill one of your party members, removing them completely from the game. This works well with the already desperate feeling the player has from Brad’s issues, and makes dangerous encounters that much more thrilling and stressful. While it may be divisive since it can completely remove a party member you worked hard to level, I think that it ties to the narrative that the world is a dangerous place and you have to find Buddy before something terrible happens to her.
LISA: THE PAINFUL – MASCULINITY AND TROPES
Brad spends most of the game rushing headlong into fights, refusing to listen to people and killing all who stand between him and Buddy. It’s easy to draw similarities between Brad and famous characters from other media, namely Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star. Brad embodies these tropes, but also reveals their downsides and failures. Brad is stoic and determined, but pushes it to the point of near-madness and incomprehensible violence, occasionally against innocents and non-combatants.
Not only is Brad a comment on certain masculine tropes, but so are the rest of the party members that he can recruit over the course of the game. Take, for example, the games recruitable Power Ranger’s analogue: Dick Dickson, the Pink Salvation Ranger. He supposedly fights for justice, but is mostly lazy and wants to party. Dick, like some of the other companions, is also a Joy addict so you have to balance his and Brad’s addictions if you want to use him. The rest of the companions are similarly based on tropes: wrestlers, gamblers, swordsmen, and more. While they are helpful, they use these tropes to explore the nature of the media that inspired them.
Like Brad, all of the men (both companions and enemies) are inspired by masculine media but generally presented as either cruel, cowardly, or silly. This defuses the tropes, taking what makes them desirable or inspiring and twisting them until they’re just damaged humans. This is further exemplified by the fact that Brad has to blackmail or hold hostages to gain certain party members. All the characters are damaged or, at the very least, painfully human.
LISA: THE PAINFUL – REVELATION AND FAILED FATHERS
Brad finds and loses Buddy again several times throughout the game. Whenever he sees her, Buddy seems reluctant to go with Brad back home. Towards the end, Brad finds Buddy on a distant island, under the watchful eye of Marty. Brad immediately loses control, though Marty swears he’s changed and hasn’t laid a hand on Buddy. Brad proceeds to beat Marty to death, knocking Buddy out of the way several times as she attempts to stop him. Brad blacks out from the rage, only to find Buddy has left on his boat, leaving him stranded.
Brad uses a corpse to swim back to the mainland, and finds Buddy under the protection of Rando, one of the most powerful warlords in all of Olathe. The last sequence is a series of tough fights as Brad first kills his own party who attempts to stop him, followed by Rando’s entire army and then Rando himself. The Rando fight is when things first seem off since Rando doesn’t appear to want to fight Brad at all. Rando wears a crimson skull mask and fights with a similar style to Brad, using much of the same moveset. Throughout the fight, Rando’s mask breaks off and reveals a heavily mutilated, crying face. The fight ends with Rando speaking:
“Y-y-you really are the best… Th… Thank you… For everything”
Earlier it was discovered that Rando was one of Brad’s students when he was a karate teacher before the flash. If the secret ending is unlocked by beating the game on Pain Mode, it’s revealed that before the flash Buzzo broke into Brad’s school only for Rando (real name Dustin Armstrong or Dusty) to try to stop him. However, since he was only a child Buzzo overpowered him and cut his face up with a buzzsaw. Brad abandoned him afterwards, disappearing into alcohol and depression. It’s also learned that Dusty is Brad’s adopted son, when, after Brad leaves in the flashback, Dusty says:
“Dad.. I-I… I’m sorry”
We’re already seeing how Brad’s stoicism has harmed other characters, but when he approaches Buddy after fighting Rando she rebukes him. Brad was so protective he never gave her a choice, controlling her entire life. For this, she resents him as a father. His failure to protect his sister led him to swing too far into the opposite direction, becoming an oppressive and bull-headed protector. The effect that his sister’s fate had on him has led him to try to lock Buddy away, instead of letting her make her own choices, no matter how dangerous the world was. She was still scared and locked away, like Lisa.
Brad collapses from his wounds and Buddy walks away, after deciding whether to hug him or not. Brad transforms into a Joy mutant and approaches Buddy. It was a foregone conclusion that Brad would turn, since Buzzo had hooked him on Joy before the beginning of the game. Thus, his part of the cycle of trauma was inevitable, and the choices in between mattered little.
LISA: THE JOYFUL – RECONTEXTUALIZATION AND GAMEPLAY SHIFTS
The Joyful starts with a flashback, showing Brad bringing a man to Buddy so that she can learn to kill. He forces her to cut his throat with a knife. This immediately is a recontextualization of the growing up scenes in The Painful, where this memory was left out. Buddy wakes from this dream to see Brad, as a mutant, watching over her. It triggers a fight, but he just looks at her and eventually gets dragged away by Buzzo. From here, Buddy travels with a sword and finds a list of the most powerful men in Olathe. She decides to kill them all so that the world has no more control or masters, taking along a heavily battered Rando/Dusty as a companion.
Instead of a combo/Karate system, Buddy uses her sword to do most of her attacks. This is tied to a timing system that allows her attacks to cause status effects and do massive amounts of damage. I find it fitting that she still uses the weapons that Brad taught her, since he taught her blades instead of karate, unlike Dusty. This is a more straightforward system than Brad’s, but it makes ludonarrative sense. Buddy has only ever known one thing, and was only taught one style by Brad. She’s attempting to break free from control from other people, but is still caught in the past. Buddy can also use Joy to buff her attacks, but hasn’t taken enough to become dependent and experience withdrawal.
Another major difference is that there are no longer recruitable party members. You get Rando for a while, but he disagrees with Buddy’s choices and eventually leaves her after she slaughters a pacifist warlord who helped provide Olathe with supplies. Rando had attempted to appeal to her as her older brother, since he is also an adopted child of Brad’s. However, Buddy cannot trust anyone and refuses to take advice, so having party members would only complicate her situation or bog down her forward momentum. Buddy only has one thing in mind: destroy all those that could control her and be completely free.
LISA: THE JOYFUL – REFLECTION AND BREAKING THE CYCLE
Rando reappears, strung up by barbed wire. Buddy catches it to keep him from falling, but is approached from behind by Bolo, a man who tried to assault her earlier. Rando begs her to drop him, to save herself from sexual assault. The player makes the choice, but choosing to follow Rando’s desperate pleas feels in line with Buddy’s changing outlook. The fall kills Rando, finally ending his sad life.
Buddy eventually kills all the warlords, leaving the world even more barren than before. She finds a man named Dr. Yado, who claims to have caused the Flash and invented Joy. He sends a Joy Mutant after her, apparently able to control them. This triggers a difficult fight that is interrupted by Buzzo attacking the mutant. He tells her to hunt down Yado, who has an antidote for Joy. She tracks him down and attacks him, but midfight the throne of Joy mutants he sits on changes into an image of Dusty, gazing hopefully upwards at a flower in his hand. This happens after it becomes obvious that Joy is starting to overtake Buddy due to her massive intake of the drug.
Dusty had tried to dissuade Buddy, opting for a world of coexistence and peace. This image seems to exemplify that, with Dusty smiling into the light and new life. You have to continue this fight, but he won’t fight back. At the end, he says:
“Good luck, sis.”
After this, Buddy hallucinates about Brad. The fight follows his progression from finding Buddy until his transformation. His name will change from Brad, to Dad, to The Nobody, reflecting both Buddy’s shifting opinion of Brad and his opinion of himself. Each one of these name changes happens between fight phases, accompanied by dialogue from Brad. When defeated he says:
You have to know this Buddy. I was completely lost before I found you. You made me feel things I’d never felt before… You showed me what love really is. And that’s why when I look into your eyes, it’s the scariest feeling in the world. It’s why I buried myself so deep into the darkness. But, I promise you, I tried so hard to fight it. I tried. And no matter what, I really did love you with all my heart. I’m so sorry I failed you, Buddy. I miss you so much.
This is Buddy reflecting on the entirety of her time with Brad; the different phases of her relationship. She starts to see Brad for the whole picture: a weak man who wanted to do the only thing he knew to protect her. Brad wasn’t a good father, but she sees his perspective on why he did things. It informs Buddy’s future choices, and helps to wrap up Brad’s character arc. This fight is, honestly, incredibly emotionally powerful. Like the recontextualization at the beginning of the game, we get it again but in a more positive light: understanding between two wounded humans.
It’s not lost on me that this sequence with Dusty and Brad happens in a hallucinogenic dream state, much like the entirety of LISA: The First. However, instead of focusing on the horrific trauma, Buddy begins to see her brother and father as more well-rounded humans. Lisa would never have the chance, her trauma was too oppressive and all-encompassing. Buddy, on the other hand, is traumatized but not in the same way as Lisa.
After this, it’s discovered that Yado is actually Buddy’s biological father, although Buzzo denies this. Buzzo kills Yado and apologizes to Buddy for what happened to Brad, calling out to Lisa as he transforms into a Joy mutant, calling only to Lisa throughout the fight:
“Lisa.. I love you. I love you. Liiiiiisa. Help me. I’m… Free.”
After this Buddy has to make the final choice, take the vaccine and end the cycle of generational trauma, or transform into a mutant and end everything.
I find it interesting that throughout the game we see many failures from male characters, but in the end the cycle is both kicked off by and potentially ended by the female characters. It has something to say about life and rebirth, while also showing how even the best intentions can go horribly awry. All of the characters are caught in cycles of generational fathers and failed masculinity/fathers. This cycle can only be broken by Buddy, who isn’t directly connected to the events from The First. Only through reflection can she break out, analyzing and thinking about her own choices and those of the ones that failed around her.
By the end of the game, we can see how all of the characters’ choices and motives spiral out from Lisa’s pain. Brad and Buzzo are tied together from it, her death made Brad distant to Dusty, and everyone is affected by Marty’s abuse. It’s hard to hate the characters (except Marty) since we see how this path was defined from the start.
So it’s here, depending on the player, the cycle either breaks or continues. I feel it’s fitting to give Buddy the final say here. After all, all she ever wanted was to be free.
LISA: FEARS OF FATHERHOOD
Briefly, I’d like to comment on how powerful this game can be for fathers. I played these games shortly after my youngest son was born. There’s an inherent fear that you won’t be a good dad, or that some little mistakes can cause irreparable damage later on. Brad’s realization that he’s hurt Buddy and failed her is a huge, and realistic fear. He should’ve shown love and compassion, but instead turned to isolation and stoicism.
His final lines as a hallucination are almost oppressively painful for someone with these fears. When he says “You showed me what love really is. And that’s why when I look into your eyes, it’s the scariest feeling in the world” it makes me tear up almost every time. That little human trusts and loves you, and it’s a daunting and terrifying feeling. In a gaming world full of sad or failing fathers (i.e. The Last of Us and God of War), Lisa really gets to the meat of the feeling and provides, I think, a much more realistic and nuanced portrayal.
This is a lot of words spilled for a game trilogy, and given the time and word-count I could probably go on and on about them forever. The games really reflect on generational trauma, casual ripples, failed masculinity, and emotional pain. Tied together to the gameplay with ludonarrative coherence, it creates an incredibly powerful and immersive experience that is unlike anything else in the world of video games, or any other art. It is singular, beautiful, harrowing and depressing. Like all good art, it questions and provokes, leading us to reflect on the world around us and ourselves. Farewell, Lisa, you deserved better.
(P.S. The soundtrack s l a p s)
