Choice of Difficulty
I beat the game on Normal but I’d recommend Easy for new players
Some players liked the original Punch Club game. The developers added an easy mode later. They didn’t seem happy about it and made fun of players who wanted it.
I wanted an easy mode. I enjoyed many parts of the game, like how it looked and the story. But some game mechanics, like stats getting worse over time, made it less fun for me. It didn’t make the game more challenging, just longer.
Some people might say I should have practiced more or that the game is meant to be hard. But “hard” can mean different things. For example, raking leaves on a big field isn’t really hard, it’s just time-consuming and not very interesting.
Punch Club 2 adds a new system called “tonus.” It’s like extra energy bars for each stat. These bars go down when you use moves in fights. You can’t refill them between rounds. If one runs out, you need to change your skills before the next fight.
To refill tonus, you work out. The workout fills tonus first, then improves your main stat. This means you often need to go to the gym between fights.
Going to the gym means dealing with food and energy in the game. These become harder to manage as you play. You have to travel to different places to eat and rest a lot. This takes time and can be annoying.
Even when you have enough money and food, you still need to do many steps to eat or rest. Nothing gets easier as you play. This new system adds extra work that some players might not like.
I also spent about 25% (seriously) of the game staring at that *** map. Dragging my cursor — which on a controller makes it even slower — to the farm, clicking, loading, buying 5 slime sammies, then back to map, drag cursor back to gym, click, load in. 500 times I did this. Is that fun? Is this fun to people?
Point is I love Lazy Bear games, but apparently I love them on easy, and can barely tolerate them on normal. I don’t even want to know what hard looks like. Maybe your food drains while the game is paused? Maybe you start the game in a wheelchair and traveling from location to location takes 20 real time minutes? Or maybe you can introduce status ailments after training that requires a healer to take care of just kidding that’s a thing already.
But seriously, I completely understand that the studio made the game in their own vision with their own difficulty and that’s their call. It’s a me problem, is what I’m saying. And I know that. But I always play games on Normal or Hard the first play through and this is the only game/studio that makes games I can only handle playing on Easy. It’s weird. Also I beat Elden Ring and other Souls games, tons of management games, and roguelike/lites that were considered very difficult. I just don’t think PC1 or Punch Club 2: Fast Forward (now) is difficult. I think it’s annoying… I’d still give the game an 8/10 though, honestly. Even after all of that. Because again, it’s a me problem.
Easy mode does pretty much exactly what I want it to do; it slows down the tedious mechanics and let’s you focus on activities, story progression, and fun. It introduces convenience, and solves a problem Normal introduced which is very strange to me. It’s like Normal is hard, Easy is normal, and Easy doesn’t exist. Lazy Bear has a very (imo) unique approach and perspective when it comes to difficulty.
Either way, I wish I had started on easy. But if you’re just picking up the game, and tend to get annoyed by painfully tedious mechanics I’d hard recommend you alleviate some of that and roll with Easy. You probably won’t miss out on anything, other than punching your keyboard or slipping into a coma while you restock your fridge at Apu’s shop for the 250th time in the last hour.
I appreciate your time and hope this little tutorial was helpful.
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