I’m back for my fourth and definitely last post about Balatro (LocalThunk). I am sure I will be able to get everything I want to say written in this poist .Easy-peasy! (That’s sarcasm in case you can’t tell, given that this is the fourth post on the subject.) And, of course, there will be
*SPOILERS*
At the end of the last post, I talked about unlocking the final joker I needed. Before I get to that, though, I want to talk about the challenge runs for a bit. There are twenty of them, and after you get five wins on any stakes with any deck, you unlock the first five challenges. I do wonder if you can have challenges that use jokers you don’t have yet and then if you have to use them for the challenge, if you’ll get to keep it in the main game. I have no idea because after winning one challenge, I put them aside until a few days ago (after I got the last joker unlocked and bought).
It’s funny because when I tried out the challenges when I first unlocked them, they seemed so hard and undoable. Even the one I won felt more like chance than anything else. They all have a theme, which I liked. Such as, the first one has five egg jokers (they go up in sell value with each round) and you won no money. So the only way to get money was to sell the egg jokers, get a blind-skipping reward that was money-based, or buy jokers that gave you money under certain conditions.
I also like that when you win one, you unlock another one. I have over half of the twenty unlocked–I think maybe thirteen or fourteen? I had assumed that they would get harder as I unlocked more, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The last two I unlocked, I won fairly easily. In fact, I think I won both on two runs. And the one before that took three tries at most. There are some earlier ones that I still haven’t beaten yet.
They’re good fun. That’s the point I’m trying to make about the challenges. Most of them. And a nice break from the grind.
Speaking of the grind.
Let’s go back to the hunt for the last joker I needde to complete my decks. I still twitch when I think about it. It’s Stuntman, and it became my white whale. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, you have to get 100,000,000 chipps in one hand to unlock it. Also as I mentioned, the highest I got in one round was 7,00,000 chips. You do the math and tell me how fucked you think I felt at the time.
I put off unlocking this joker beacuse I knew that it was going to fuck with me. I don’t like having to think when I play video games, and I knew this was going to be a thinking joker. I tried my best to do it organically, but I wsa not even coming close. I had to do what I hate to do–which is maximize my build. Again, I was using the Plasma Deck because I knew that was the one with the most potential for high scores. I was plugged in enough to the meta to recognize that.
At some point, I broke. I looked up all the best builds and mentioned it in the RKG Balatro forum. I got tips from reading the other forums and from a person in the RKG Discord Balatro forum. The one that really hit home was to get all the duplicative jokers possible. The one that everyone said not to sleep on was Hanging Chad. As I mentioned before, it triggers your card two more times with all the enhancements. Obviously, if you want to get many chips, you have to get multipliers.
I took that seriously and continued the grind. I lost perspective as to what I was doing and why I was doing it. Just to get one measly joker that probably wasn’t even worth it? I knew what the joker was, but I wasn’t quite sure what it did. I also knew it wasn’t a Legendary, obviously, so it couldn’t be that good, right? But the stubborn completionist in me would not let it go. I had to get that joker, and I played countless hands while consistently falling short.
We’re talking several in-real-world days. I would post about it in the Discord forum and call it chasing my white whale. People were encouraging and saying I would do it. I did not believe them, sadly, because I was not, in fact, doing it. I was nowhere close to doing it.
As I said, I was interspersing this with trying to win on orange stake with my beloved Blue Deck. I was not doing well, there, either, and it was a few days of misery for me. I felt as if I was making no progress, which was not a good feeling. I know there is a point in every roguelite/like when you just have to grind for that item or whatnot. Actually, this is more like what I have to do in a FromSoft game than in, say, Hades.
I mentioned in a previous post that I didn’t mind grinding in a From game to get runes/souls/blood echoes. That meant I could level up my character, which was always appreciated. In this game, though, I feel much differently about it.
In addition, I don’t like that there are certain jokers that are completely negated in certain situations. Such as any face card-related joker and when you have the boss who debuffs all face cards. I know that’s part of the RNG, but it just feels too random and too cruel.
I guess my point is that the balance is off and needs to be tweaked. I don’t know how because that’s not my forte or bailiwick. I have read forums in which people have expressed something similar. Many people saying it’s just not fun when you hit the higher stakes, with which I agree. I still think of myself as a newbie though I guess I’m really not.
I said yesterday or the day before that I wished the game wasn’t quite as deep as it was–and I have to say, it’s not even that it’s the depth. It’s the grindiness and how the higher stakes feel lacking in some way. I don’t mind upping the antes once, but twice? That feels cheap (ironically). And all the different limitations on the jokers doesn’t really add anything other than stress to me.
I get that it’s supposed to make you more strategic. I get that it’s for the more hardcore player. In the video I included above, the way the guy just rips through the game is astounding. But that’s not where I am, nor is it where I’ll ever be. I’m just not that good, and I know that I won’t be. Out of curiosity, I looked up Completionist+ and Completionist++ in the achievements. It’s completing gold stakes with every deck and getting a gold sticker on every joker* respectively.
I am not going to go for that. I am already tiring of the game and that would completely kill any positive feelings I have for it.
Hm. I’m done for the day, but it seems I have one more post in me. Maybe We shall see.
*You get a sticker on the joker when it is in your hand as you win a run. So, in order to get Completionist++, you have to have every one of the 150 stickers in hand (on different runs, obviously) on a gold stakes win. I can’t even comprehend that, honestly.