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As someone who is about to finish the Joyful, here's my opinion about the series: The First is a Yume Nikki clone, and is a bit of a prelude to The Painful with some characters that do get vaguely mentioned throughout the series. It's not much, and you might as well watch it on YouTube instead of playing it yourself. The Painful is the main course: It's a pretty unique RPG despite being made in RPGMaker. Despite having a few little issues, it is one of the best indie RPGs. The story is quite good, it also got a good bunch of humor despite the setting being pretty fucking bleak. It knows to find a good balance between funny moments and 'oh god what the absolute fuck' moments. One of the most interesting things about it, is how the choices that you make have actually an impact on the gameplay, villages and the fate of some characters. It's not like Telltale's 'lol this guy will die one chapter later anyway', some of the choices that you make will screw over some characters, or will end up saving them. That is, if they don't die later on against a Mutant. That every party Character outside of Brad is killable doesn't help either with that. One word of advice with that: Especially the first act loves to throw some very, very nasty surprises at you if you aren't careful. Speaking about the party characters, there are a lot of them, and you won't end up using every single one during one playthrough. They do differ a lot from each other though, so if one of them bites the dust, it isn't like you could replace them with someone who does exactly the same. Some of those characters are memorable (which will also get the most use), while others don't add much at all. The soundtrack is also good, despite being also pretty weird sometimes. It fits with the vibe of the game, to say so. The Joyful is pretty much an epilogue chapter. As you are on your own, it doesn't have much interesting things gameplay-wise. It's mostly to wrap LISA's story up in a 2-4 hour epilogue chapter. Some of the more mysterious non-party characters from The Painful get some development, so your opinion might vary if it is a good or bad thing. For some characters it is decent, for some, it isn't. It also lacks most of the trademark humor of The Painful, yet it certainly has it's moments. Especially the final few bosses are memorable. The soundtrack is probably the best thing about it though.

This is fucking disgusting.

The flavour for this is kinda cute. One by one the zombies get distracted by flashy spells being cast until you just have a bunch of scattered ones.