What happened?
Lab Zero sucks at making actual video games
They made a spunky brown tomboy the heroine but forgot that only works in an eroge.
When you make a video game, "fun" cannot be an afterthought.
MC lacks the charm of Leilani.
People forgot this game existed a month after it came out until the switch shit fest happened
the combat was lackluster at best. they had an idea for it that just didnt work but they stuck with it in the hopes of making it fun with enough tweaks.
I thought it was okay, aside from combat being 'mash all 4 buttons as fast as possible with your giant bear paws and maybe tilt the stick sometimes if they block'
I 100%'d it in 2 days.
Not enough waifus or tits. Especially tits. That's why skull girls succeeded
>Anja was probably actually well-written and more openly sexual before the script was rewritten
>the rewrite was such a hack job trying to connect all the white lesbians to the Shantae recolors that the gutted Anja has less character than the guy who killed her father, who the new script actually gives an arc to
It's hard to mess up "spunky brown tomboy who hits things and fights to avenge her father's murder", but Lab Zero did it.
her weird spic voice happened
Would you call that a spic accent? It sounded like a mix of different accents.
Pretty much this. MC is a cunt and her "redemption" is so forced it hurts.
I want to suck Leilani's toes.
the shitty redesigns
that double boomerang oc fuckhead
they hired writers 2 years after the game was on development
i guess it's more SEA than anything but spic's the first word that came to mind
Why can't a brown tomboy be the protag?
mental illness does not make for a super compelling protag
Did they finally shit out the switch port?
Because you can’t trust any writer in this cultural climate to write one that doesn’t have a grating personality.
That's honestly what sold me on a game. All they had to do is to give her like a cute tomboy personality. Fun, easygoing, loving her "sports", dumb in a cute way. But nah, western devs, had to make her a cunt, overconfident and cocky.
Could have been:
>Persona but with middle-eastern culture and mythology
Ended up being:
>???
> Persona but with middle-eastern culture and mythology
Biting way more than you can chew.
>made an inferior VP clone
>made an inferior metroidvania
>plot was shit
>mc is insufferable
Valkyrie Profile was never good
Western writers can't do tomboys like Japan. They always end up being ultra-masculine or dykes, or both.
Well the Switch version is out, now I only have to wait for it to ship before I can answer your question.
Because she wasn't white.
Pretty much failed in all departments.
>Anja was probably actually well-written and more openly sexual before the script was rewritten
Source on the script been rewritten? Because that's what I always thought actually happened. The vibes I got from Ajna in the prototype were the furthest things away from what she eventually turned into. She was also marketed with angry, stoic facial expressions, a trait you'd save for a character with a head on their shoulders, but what I saw in the final game was mostly "LOOK AT ME I'M SO RANDOM AND QUIRKY HAHA FOURTH WALL WHAT IS THAT DO YOU EAT IT HEHEHE"
I remember starting the game and it snapping from Scottish to Russian in the first two minutes
no spats thighjob and hotdogging lewds
>Burmese character named Dhar
>Wields a Burmese dha
>Generic fantasy swordsman design
Take a look at any element of the game, and it radiates "all style, no substance".
There's a gorillion characters, but they're all just like this guy:
>Look up a melee weapon of history and the culture that used it
>Draw concept art of a person of that culture using that weapon
>AND BADA-BING BADA-BOOM YOU GOT YOURSELF A NEW CHARACTER
There's an Indian guy who uses an urumi. Apparently his personality is "he uses an urumi".
There was an African character who used those weird-looking African throwing knives, but he was cut. I guess they literally couldn't even think of any lines for him, they just stopped at "he uses those weird African throwing knives".
There's a big Greco-Roman amazon lady, but because she's so big, she shoots spears from her bow instead of arrows. Other than that, generic amazon stereotypes but also with a little touch of anime and SJW, like every other character.
The "gameplay" part was clearly an afterthought, this game was literally sold on the merits of the art/artist alone, based on the 'success' of Skullgirls. "A gorillion characters each designed around a single concept/trope with no depth required" only works for fighting games, because fighting games are sold on the underlying/overarching GAMEPLAY.
>DO YOU EAT IT HEHEHE
I actually liked that bit.
SOTN and SM are beloved classics that hold up to this day. Their formulas are thoroughly polished and well understood.
VP was a fun little niche game that got by on novelty more than anything else. It's core systems are unrefined.
So where SOTN and SM have given birth to entire sub-genre of successful indie clones because they are a sturdy dependable and proven scaffold you can build almost anything upon and still come out with a game people want to play. VP would need someone to first figure out how to make VP fun, a tough task in and of itself, and then they'd have to build a game off that. Lab Zero just wasn't up to the task. Their previous game was a mediocre fighter, and fighters are probably one of the most well understood genre's out there. Going from that into the uncharted territory of a VP clone when VP wasn't great to begin with, just proved beyond their abilities.