The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I love it, of course, and I think you all should play it. If I had to guess, I’d say I’m about two-thirds of the way through it? I’m not going to talk about story or anything until I get it done, though. (I am kind of very invested in the game’s plot, way more than one would expect for a game where the gameplay consists on posting rude things on the VanillaLand Vagina Fetish Forum.) I just want to talk about a few of the gameplay changes that have happened since I played last, and some of the odd design choices. This might still have some spoilarz in there, so, you know, if you’re going to play through, and you totally, completely should, you may want to stay away.

The biggest change, and really, this happened before episode 3 rolled, was the addition of elemental damage to the Forumwarz universe. I think this is an amazing change. Now every attack is either labeled “Aggression,” “Antisociality,” “Narcissism,” “Misanthropy,” or “Incompetence.” Forums are weak or resistant to these various types of attacks. For example, the DENSA Low IQ Society would probably not take much damage from Incompetence attacks.
This was an excellent change.
Not only does this add a slight element of strategy to the beginning of fights with new forums, where you have to test out various attacks to see what works, this also gives you incentive not to spam whatever has the highest attack power over and over. Especially if your class does not have a lot of options for certain types of attacks, you may have to dig back far in your move catalog to come up with an effective attack. This keeps you constantly varying your attacks, and thus varying the funny things you see on the screen, and that keeps you much more involved in battles than before. I like it. I also like that this gives another clear differentiation between the different classes. My Emo Kid has little to no Aggressive attacks. That’s just not how Emos work. I do have a lot of powerful Misanthropy and Antisociality attacks, though. Forums weak against those types go down easy, while others are much more of a challenge. If I leveled my Camwhore up to Episode 3 levels, she would probably find challenge in much different areas. It’s pretty awesome.

They also added a wider variety of effects that a forum can throw at you. These I am less universally happy about. Most of these effects can only be combated by buying and using lots of items in battle. The items aren’t expensive, but wasting turns in forum combat using them DOES open yourself up to more attack, which in turn costs you more healing items in the long run. This is really the part I like about the game the least: success is really determined by mining enough Flezz to buy a ton of healing items beforehand, and most of these attacks just drain more resources. I do like the “Moderator Appears!” moves, because that’s thematically awesome. But things like “Power Spikes” which destroy your expensive healing items and “Packet Loss” which force you to defend with AFK for 6 turns just don’t add as much strategy as one would hope. They’re just frustrating. Still, I understand how hard it has to be to come up with interesting ways to change these battles, so I don’t fault them for it. I’m just not having much fun figuring out how to circumvent them. The solution is just to spend even more resources on items, and more time farming those resources. Ho hum.

The last thing I want to bring up is the fact that I have come in contact with at least one very miss-able piece of content in the game. I received an item early on. It was junk, just like the stuff you have to sell for money. So I sold it. Later on, another character asked me for one. If I had saved it, I probably would have got some awesome reward. What was it? I have no idea. Going about my normal business, using the tricks to speed up my play built into the game screwed my emo kid out of ever seeing that content.
Now, that whole thing is an interesting idea. But man, that is so very, very miss-able. I’m marginally okay with that. I understand the reason for it. You want people to play your game a lot, try different things, and go through it again to see more. However, I feel like there was little way to see this coming, and as someone who loves this content and wants to see it all, but doesn’t really have the time or patience to run 5 characters through the game, it kind of bothers me that I won’t know what that did.

Still, though, it’s been overwhelmingly positive for me so far. I do so love Forumwarz. All the new Emo Kid attacks have me laughing, and the plot continues to keep me going. So play it! I’ll be back to talk about the plot when I’m done with it, I suppose.