After playing through the Definitive Edition of Lisa the Painful/Joyful I must say I am very happy to have experienced this once again. It truly is one of the best RPG experiences I have played and the fact it is now being brought into the popular gaming news cycle again is always a delight for me.
However, something interesting to note is the fact that the game has had some forms of censorship placed upon it in various scenes. Now on the PC version, the main one, this doesn’t change too much as it mostly just modifies some sound effects to be a bit more tasteful and changes a song due to copyright reasons. However on the Playstation version of the game it has had many more changes, especially regarding Buddy’s adventures in Joyful. Now while the changes are indeed silly, I don’t blame the creator of the game and instead see it as Sony being rather sensitive to the topics brought up in the game, despite it very clearly being a mature game with dark themes.
Other people aren’t being so kind however, and decry that this is the end of the series being good and these changes ruin everything, to which I thinkis just ridiculous. Did some changes need to be made to adhere to console releases? Sure. Do they detract from the game at all? Absolutely not. It reminds me of how Anime series when brought over to the west back in the day were censored, while yes some of the scenes have different tones or ruined contexts they were still very much enjoyable and it didn’t exactly ruin the experience, and I feel this is absolutely the same here, especially on PC in which the changes barely affect anything.
I’m just happy we get more Lisa, and if some modern sacrifices have to be made to do so then so be it. But these aren’t even sacrifices, these are just tasteful changes which I am happy were made. The console versions are another story, but I’m just happy the game is being introduced to more people, more Lisa is more depression after all!
That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.