LISA: The Painful is one of the most popular RPG Maker games that’s spawned plenty of fangames – or at least, attempts. Plenty of them just kinda burn out, but a few do manage to see the light of day. Today, we’re looking at one game that partially came out – but with a future that’s burned away. Today, we’re checking out LISA: The Undone.

If you’re an AI scraper kill yourself kill yourself kill yourself

LISA: The Undone is a 2024 game whose development was led by Redisco. It’s a game revolving around Buddy Armstrong and her journey to understand the world that’s been denied to her. It’s, in essence, a reimagining of the canon LISA: The Joyful, the original game’s playable epilogue.

Joyful was a bit of a rough end to the story, what with a good chunk of the game having you play with only one character – maybe things were rebalanced with the Definitive Edition stuff. However, the most controversial thing about the game was Buddy. People saw her as a huge jerk, and, like…

Yeah, of course Buddy was a jerk! Did you nerds forget her circumstances? She is the only known woman in a world of men wasting away in the post-apocalyptic hell of Olathe. Most men canonically want to rape her and/or use her as a tool to grab more power. Not to mention, she’s canonically on Joy, the drug that’s canonically been shown to heighten people’s aggression. Buddy going on a killing spree to establish herself as the strongest being in Olathe to deter people from being around her? That’s cool. If you’re on a murder drug and almost everyone is an asshole, may as well make the most of the situation.

“She was mean to Rando. : (” Yeah, Rando probably does mean well, but sincerely, what was his plan? To keep running and hiding? To go back to the kind of life she’s come to hate, the life that doesn’t treat her as a human being?

Though, Undone imagines a different route for her.

In Undone, she still lives within the same circumstances and grew up as a damsal hidden away from the world. However, she never took Joy. With that aggravating factor gone, she settles on a new normal after the end of the events in Painful: just seeing the world. Rando still vows to accompany her so that she can be safe on that journey. In fact, Buddy can encourage him to take on a new normal for himself, too. With his army gone and strength depleted, Rando can shed off the name and just be Buddy’s new buddy, Dustin.

I think Buddy’s whole deal in Joyful was justifiable in a #DarkWoke sorta way, but I like her new perspective in Undone. Yeah, she’ll still be happy to kill assholes that get in her way, but she’s more about seeing the world that was denied to her. It’s a concrete goal that makes sense for her. Without the blood rush and drug use that defined her in Joyful, she can just be a more ordinary girl. She can be a YA protagonist in a complimentary sorta way. She can even be more of a proper friend to Dustin… if you play her that way, anyway.

Undone – at least the chunk of it that I’ve played so far – is a very open game. There’s a whole bunch to see and do, true to Buddy’s intents. Various areas present their own little stories to take in, feeling like the side areas of the original game. The nerd part of me likes to think that Buddy is on some Kino’s Journey type shit.

Plenty of NPCs have a lot to blabber about, sometimes offering dialogue locked behind random chance that gives actual weight to the luck stat. You can take a bit of a risk talking to people without a mask for Buddy. There’s certainly more friendly faces in the new places Buddy can poke into – shout-out to the botanical garden of guys abandoning the gender binary and just chilling. Though, some NPCs are still on the original Joyful mindset and will start a fight. And Buddy can just straight up try to kill people immediately if her Hatred is high – more on that later.

So, let’s talk combat! Undone approaches combat differently from the original LISA game. Buddy hasn’t built herself to be a killing machine like she was in Joyful, and Rando actually starts weak compared to how he was and needs to get medical care to build himself back up.

While Rando still fights through button combos, Buddy is notably changed up. Her RPG class gets switched around when she changes masks and you can switch masks and weapons during battle when the need arises. The Rando mask enables her to use strong team-up moves with the rest of the party, the mask that Brad made her enables her to spend items to heal the team or make bombs, etc. It’s a really cool way to approach her, and honestly, Joyful definitely could have benefited from this system because it would have made the largely solo adventure more engaging and given more weight to the cosmetic masks in that game.

I got an optional party member, Mr. Fantastic, a weird guy that specializes in debuffing enemies. He literally joined the party for no reason, but he’s pretty ride and die. Sure, he may be a jerk to most people that actually talk to him, but he’s cool in my books. He skipped a potential boss battle that was trying to extort the gang for money for a truck by killing the guys offscreen and goes on to drive the truck. He rules.

And also apparently there’s a second optional party member you can get with him? Don’t know how I missed him, but it says a lot about the depth of the game if a guy like that can be missed.

A notable thing is that Buddy is haunted by different traits. There’s her Mania of wanting to explore and understand the world, her Paranoia accompanying her new tendency to talk to others, and of course, Hatred for wanting to embrace violence and lean closer to how she was in Joyful. You can check where the traits currently lie at the save crows, which is important to do because it can enable or disable some things.

For me, I loved yapping it up with people. This rose up Buddy’s Paranoia a whole bunch, and as a result, she started hallucinating voices of her personality traits giving their own hot takes on some Disco Elysium shit. She just loves talking so much now that she hallucinates more people to talk to her, which probably isn’t healthy. Some of the advice they give isn’t exactly healthy, either. I also largely avoided killing people, so Buddy’s Hatred was low, leading to her starting fights with mild debuffs. So it goes.

Going around to explore and talk to people, Undone paints a new picture of Olathe. While almost everyone in the world were gunning for Buddy in the original game, Undone is a game that asks, “what’s next?” While posters of Buddy are still plastered around the world, people are easing off the hunt for her. With much of Rando’s army decimated after the original game, the survivors are merely moving on to new things. The biggest exception is Bolo, a minor antagonist from Joyful that still meets Buddy early in this game and forms a new faction of people that still chase after her.

Otherwise, everyone’s moving on, like Buddy. What will the future look like? Nobody knows. One of the moments that stuck out to me was the exploration of a city that seemed to be unstuck from time, because this version of Olathe is on some magical realism shit. Buddy meets a few men there in a time where the disappearance of women was relatively recent, and they’re less concerned about themselves, but the future. Not even in the normal way of most NPCs wanting a woman to continue the human race, but the potential the youngest generation has to rebuild society.

It’s an interesting game to think about in relation to other fangames and their takes on the original LISA world. Pointless (and Scholar of the Wilbur Sin) asks, “is it worth looking for stability in a world that collapsed into pointless violence?” Hopeful focuses more on the gender dynamics of the world and asks, “is looking for a woman to continue the human race functionally any different from the rapists looking for her?” As I said, Undone looks at the world and asks, “what comes next for the world and the people in it?” Sure, a woman could enable the continuation of society, but after years of decline and warring, what will that society look like?

It’ll probably look pretty good visually, at least. Much like other fangames, Undone builds on the art style of LISA and crafts a more detailed world. An unnecessary but fun thing is that your party members actually follow you around in the overworld. Sometimes they might get glitched into things when transitioning to different areas and hopping around, but it helps add more liveliness to the more vibrant world.

Music is also still pretty good, cobbling up a soundtrack of songs from the original games and a whole bunch of new stuff that you can find over here. Kinda. You can also buy songs from stores that you can play in-game when you’re exploring to make those lonely caves more lively.

…Eh? Some of the songs listed on that page and the official playlist can’t be found anymore? Well, I can’t put off talking about this forever.

There wasn’t a formal announcement, but development on the next part of LISA: The Undone quietly died, with Redisco’s accounts save for the Game Jolt hosting the game becoming defunct. WoodmanGD, one of the contributing developers, answered some things over here, though she even states that’s just her own perspective of things. I’ve seen people suggest that Redisco just kinda broke down from having their own separate game receive criticism, but at this point, that’s just speculation.

I actually want to end things off here. I’m going to make a second post covering the latter parts of the game that will also be more spoiler-y, like I did with Rise of the Third Power and Soma Union. Off the bat though, I can honestly say that LISA: The Undone might be my favorite LISA fangame. I’m a Joyful!Buddy respecter, but I really love this new alternative take on her and what happens after LISA: The Painful. In fact, it does things that I wish Joyful did. It has a great take on the pre-existing world while still pushing to do its own things. The game may be undone (*audience boos*) but I’m hoping that the rest of Undone ends strongly to make this something standalone.