And so we return to LISA: The Undone, where I’m talking about more plot stuff. This will be all spoilers, but here’s a non-spoiler assessment before the Safe for Work Sasuke screenshot spam: this is honestly the best LISA fangame and is easily better than the canon Joyful, and it’s so disappointing that development ended. Undone’s first act does end in an open place that I like, but it’s a shame there won’t be an official follow-up (as official as a fangame can get, anyway). You can read the first part here if you somehow didn’t already.

Besides reimagining Buddy, LISA the Undone reimagines other characters from Joyful. In this canon, the List that Buddy followed as a killing checklist is established as a sorta treaty. Outside of Rando, the ten strongest men in Olathe and their gangs establish respected territories and don’t fight each other.

A flashback shows that Rando held a meeting with the warlords, and I really liked that it established them as actual characters instead of sorta RPG Mega Man bosses that only really get brief dialogue before the start of their fights. The warlords in Joyful are completely reimagined, and besides Lardy (more on him later), it’s kinda nuts how much these reimaginings completely mog the original warlords from Painful. Hawk Hollywood just looks so lame compared to these guys.

Though, the most important of these characters is Vega Van Dam. His domain isn’t some random ruin, but something more grand: the city of Taiga. Taiga is easily one of the most stable places in Olathe and has a surprising wealth of resources. In fact, people in Taiga aren’t just surviving, but partying, living on a disco mindset. Van Dam isn’t the pathetic party boy he was in the original game, but a guy on straight up Marie Antoinette shit.

Taiga is where the final act of Undone takes place. Buddy wishes to explore the world further and Taiga’s a roadblock… but she may as well live it up while she can. She can even take a new name for herself. Say goodbye to Buddy and say hello to Roderica Karishma Alexandre.

The city is a very chill place. Buddy can freely wander around without a mask because nobody wants to ruin the social order. Granted, most people see her as a guy, but the people that do recognize her as a girl don’t want to cause trouble. Buddy can actually meet an out trans woman and have a proper girl-time chat with her, with the implications that Buddy is open to questioning her own gender. From looking at the game’s files, Buddy’s Hatred won’t even ruin the good times, even if it’s high.

After all, she’d be tried in the court system set up to emulate the old world. Outside of Vega Van Dam, the city of Taiga is administered by three judges that act as the routes you can take in the last act.

Glowhead, the disco-ball headed man that brought the party to the route leading to Taiga, is on a grindset. Acting like the old world economy is still in action, he aims to get rich and encourages Buddy to do the same. Robert Bagnio is a counter, being an open communist that wants to turn Taiga into a fair society, with Buddy to act as his vanguard. Meanwhile, there’s Akira Yamato, a white guy pretending to be Japanese who wants Buddy to be a cop to help obtain his vision of a cultured and orderly society.

Yeah, the Disco Elysium vibes already existed with the voices that could talk to Buddy, but Undone proudly wears the Disco Elysium inspirations in Taiga.

There’s a lot to see and do in Taiga, which may diverge with routes you follow. A notable thing to do is the wrestling arc. Undone also reimagines Rando a bit through establishing a past beyond his relationship with Brad Armstrong, telling that he used to be in a circus before going on to remake himself as Rando. The wrestling ring is run by the family that used to run the circus, and they’re openly abusive toward Rando and want to make his matches hell. This is also the only definitive fights I managed to get in my playthrough of the last act besides the end, helping make him stronger for that.

Also, I feel bad that I encouraged Rando to take up his old name. I thought I was helping him, but he took Rando to escape the connotations his name gained from his life in the circus. Sorry for deadnaming you, Rando.

But the good times have to end eventually. Regardless of who Buddy helps, the judges try Vega Van Dam in a thinly veiled ploy to get power for themselves. Buddy feels betrayed, because even if she wasn’t actively targeted by men, she was still taken advantage of for selfish power in this timeline.

Another constant then appears. He appeared once much earlier, but Yado – the secret main villain of the LISA games – meets Buddy and Rando when they head to the court to demand proper passage out of Taiga. He has a much more active villain role in Untold and isn’t just a bizarre background presence like in Joyful – dude even ditched the gaudy polka dot fit. For the sake of his plans, Yado is summoning the Joy Mutants that Taiga cast out to destroy the city, and honestly, he comes off as more interesting than canon Yado.

Buddy and Rando interrupt Van Dam’s trial, urging the judges to stop the trial and work on evacuating everyone from the city. When it comes down to it though, the judges all value life in Taiga and refuse to abandon it. Even Robert refuses to leave, because for all his talk of change, he wants to change what already exists instead of starting something new.

A general vibe I read in Taiga is that it’s a place that desperately wants to pretend the world never ended. Everyone’s partying or just living, with no interest in the greater world outside of the city. The judges want to change things, but they only want to change things to fit the visions they had for the old world. It’s an eternal nostalgia-fest, with most of the population feeling like the type of guys that want sequels and remakes for the old stuff.

But what about the future? What about the next/last generation of the world?

Stepping back to the warlords, I need to talk about Lardy Hernandez, who’s encountered before the trek to Taiga. In the original game, the Hernandez family handled transportation and goods shipping in Olathe, and Lardy didn’t look too different from his brothers. However, he has the sharpest change out of the Joyful warlords: he’s a child. He’s essentially a figurehead for his family, the apocalypse’s last living nepo baby.

For a brief moment, Buddy has a good time hanging out with Lardy until she winds up punching him. Lardy calls for his father to expel the party from the train, but the train ends up crashing. RIP to the apocalypse’s last living nepo baby (presumably, anyway).

Other children don’t have the luxury of Lardy, however. In Taiga, Buddy can find other children wandering around, most of them in poor condition. In sheer contrast with the men from that time displaced city I found in the first part, the men in modern Taiga are indifferent at best.

The existence of children in the original LISA world is a big question mark. Besides Buddy, the only notable child that exists in the party member Jack – who was a Kickstarter backer made character and may as well have not existed. The other children that exist in that Olathe wasteland are shown to die in some Family Guy style comedy. Otherwise, it’s all manly Fist of the North Star action. The general lack of proper care toward children kinda asks, how many of the people gunning for Buddy actually cares about the next generation of humanity, as they supposedly claim?

In conversations, Buddy can find a quiet solidarity with Taiga’s children, espousing the “kids rule!” mindset that Lardy introduced to her. And regardless of whether or not she’s talked to them, Taiga’s children hold onto that mantra.

LISA the Undone climaxes with a final fight against the stubborn asshole judges, who unite in spite of their differences to fight the people threatening the status quo. Even if you’ve played Buddy peacefully, you can spend the chapter gathering tools to make the battle go by smoothly. For me, Buddy was the GOAT at playing support and throwing firebombs while Rando’s punching the shit out of everyone.

The fight takes place in a courtroom full of men, but none of them step in. It’s Taiga’s children that are the ones to step up and help. Every few turns, they heal and revive Buddy and Rando, cheering Buddy on to succeed. This final boss is metaphorically a fight of a new generation against the old generation. A fight between people obsessed with their own versions of the past and people representing what could come next.

Some other things happen, but I won’t spoil that. I’ll leave it to you.

I will say that at the end, Buddy and Rando settle down at a campsite where the children of Taiga are. With the general theming of the game and the aid during the courtroom boss, I imagine that the next part of Undone would have been them adventuring together. I think it would have evolved into a true coming of age story of kids looking toward the future instead of men sticking to the destroyed past. Maybe the next part would have doubled down on the question of what’s next for the world.

You know how Disco Elysium was going to have a sequel starring Cuno and Cunoesse that got cancelled? The cancellation of further parts of LISA the Undone kinda has that energy.

LISA the Undone is a fascinating game, and now that I finished it, I’m sad that the game ends here. It’s a very open ending, but I would have loved to see further reimaginings of Joyful, especially with regards to the brief look we get at the reimagined Joyful warlords.

However, that doesn’t mean this isn’t worth looking at. My final save file boasts around 7 hours of playtime, and I know that there’s a bunch of stuff I skipped. It’s a game that definitely invites replays, so I’m sure a lot can be dug out of the game for the Playtime-cels. And like Scholar of the Wilbur Sin, the game folder openly has the project files available, so you can dig in and study the game’s design – and perhaps you can make your own follow-up to LISA the Undone.