I’m here to talk more about Balatro (LocalThunk) and when the joy started seeping out of the game for me. At the end of the last post, I talked about how you get the Legendary Jokers and how soul-sucking it was for me to get the last two. When I alked people in the RKG Discord Balatro channel if they had the same issues, no one else had the amount of angst I did in unlocking the legendaries.
Side note: I have been doing a loose play-along playthrough of Rory (R of RKG) playing Elden Ring, and he has been incredibly lucky with item drops. Except one time that took hours and 69 (nice) misses to get one chest piece. That was the best episode of the series so far, though, so there’s that. There’s a 4% chance to get the chest piece, which is the same percent chance to get any other armor piece from this particular knight.
They were on their way to fight a big boss, and Krupa wanted to get this particular piece of armor just so they could get a bit of lore before the fight. He figured it would take a few tries. Several hours later, they were loopy, but determined not to leave without it. They had reached that liminal stage where everything was hilarious and nothing made sense. It was glorious.
In my own playthrough, it took me 150 attempts to get the same drop. Over twice what it took them–and five hours. Let’s not talk about it. I still shudder when I think of it.
I bring it up, though, because it illustrates how shitty my luck is. I blame it on dying (twice). Coming back from that used up all my luck for the rest of my life. It’s a fine trade-off, but it does make these little things very irritating.
The reason I brought this up is because those five hours for that one chest armor was nothing compared to what I went through to get those last two Legendary Jokers in Balatro. Literal days it took to get them, and no joy to be had at all. At least with the farming in Elden Ring, I can just put on a video and watch it as I mindlessly grind for runes (or that one chest piece). I did not have to think about it because when I farmed, it was on easy mode. There is one particularly famous farming area in which you can kill one enemy for over ten-thou runes a pop, or kill a bunch of enemies in that area fairly easily for thirty-thou (I think. I did not go that route until NG+, and then it was close to a hundred thou a run). If you choose to go for the singular enemy, you don’t even have to fight it–you just shoot an arrow at it from afar, and it runs off a cliff.
In grinding for the Legendary Jokers, I still had to play the game and could not turn off my brain. Yes, I could have a video on, but I couldn’t just watch it as I mndlessly grinded. Ground? Grounded.
The worst part was that I got more and more frustrated the longer it took to get them. I had no fun at all playing those hands, and I wa seething whenever I did not get The Soul (the spectral card needed to turn into a Legendary Joker).
Look. I know how percentages work. There’s another percentage effect in this game (one tarot card that has a 1 in 4 chance of turning a joker in youur hand into a better edition of that joker) and if it doesn’t happen, a big Nope! wiggles on screen. People have griped about it for ages, and there’s even a joke from the developer (I think) that says, “People actually believe they have a 1 in 4 chance of this working!” Or else it’s a mock-up someone else made of the dev saying that.
In the Balatro channel, we’ve moaned about it at length, too. I said I know how probability works, but I still get disappointed when I have three or four Nope!s in a row. It’s the same with The Soul. I got so few of them, I was convinced that the game was against me.
Side note deux: I hated Disco Elysium (ZAVUM). It’s a big indie darling that seemingly everyone loved. Except me. I didn’t talk about it because I knew that people would not like what I had to say about it, but I loathed it with every fiber of my being. There were many reasons such as how excruciatingly slow you accrued money, how micromanaging the whole game was, and how almost every character was repugnant. In fact, I quit the game because one of the kids was written in such an appalling way, it literally made me sick when I had to interact with him.
He was written in a way to be deliberately repulsive, but in a completely unbelievable way. And it felt very much like the developer was patting themselves on the back for how edgy they were being. And/or gritty. The second he yelled a completely repellant sentence at me, I quit the game and did not look back.
However. That’s not why I brought up the game. It’s because of probability again. This game had gameplay that was heavily based on dice rolls. Which, as we know, are based on probabilities. I had leveled up one of my stats to something like 90% or higher (perception? Something like that), so it meant that I should do well on dice rolls for perception.
I remember doing a roll and failing, and then I got to do it again. And I failed again. This happened so many times, and it was so fucking discouraging. Yes, I know how probabilities work, but this was a video game, and it was supposed to be fun to play. That was not fun to repeatedly fail rolls for which I had over 90% probability of passing.
I have not played Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian), but Ian told me that they have the option that you can have kind rolls (I’m citing this from memory) so that you will not repeatedly fail rolls that you should win. Not that you’ll win every time, but it will be scaled in a way that you have better than actual odds of winning. You can also choose not to do this, but I thought it was a brilliant addition because again, a game was supposed to be fun.
Which is a long way around way of saying that I hated grinding for those last two Legendary Jokers. There’s no way I should have had to take actual in-the-real-world days to get two fucking jokers. And they’ne not any good, anyway! I mean, at least not that I can immediately see.
The challenges are…fine. I spent a few hours on them, and I’m pretty meh about them. Of course I’m going to try to unlock them all, but I’m not really having a good time with them.
I have noted more than once that the game is deep, but now I want to say that I think it didn’t need to be that deep. I have gotten the red stakes on all the decks and am working on the green stakes (next round) with the red deck (one more discard is the main distinction).
I’m not enjoying it. I’m feeling each loss even more than before. Because it gets exponentially harder with each stake, every loss stings more. Even more so than in other roguelite/likes.
I think it’s because there are no permanent upgrades so I’m back to zero before every run. And, yes, I’m still skipping blinds. So there, Balatro community.
I think one thing that amuses me is that I don’t feel confident about my skills at all, but I’ve managed to bumble along and get quite far because of sheer stubbornness. Other people in the RKG Discord who seemed to be further along than I am have revealed that they don’t have all the jokers. So they are not ahead of me in that case.
One thing I need to do is be more flexible with my builds. I tend to stick to the same jokers and the same upgrades because that’s what I’m comfortable with. Yes, that’s gotten me this far, but I had to switch it up for some of the jokers unlock, and it may behoove me to do it more in the future.
That’s all for today. I think I have one more post in me.