Yes, I’m back with part five of my ‘final’ review of Balatro (LocalThunk). Today, I have been grinding out the Big Hands achievement (getting 80 cards in a deck), and I haven’t geotten close. Well, I have gotten maybe 70 once? There are not as many useful tips when I Google as there were for Tiny Hands, the last achievement I grinded/ground out.
By now, I’m decent enough at the game that I had a vague idea of what I needed to do. Adding 38 cards to the deck meant, once again, radically changing up my play (and the deck I would use to do it). Also, I had to be careful because I was looknig for the Hanged Man tarot card and the Immolation spectral card when I was going for Tiny Hands. I did not want either of these for my current achievement hunting, obviously. Both these cards got rid of cards (2 and 5 respectively), which would be counterproductive for my current purposes.
Instead, I was to eschew the tarot cards completely as none of them add cards to the deck. Instead, spectral cards are my best friend, and only the Ghost Deck gives you a realistic chance to get them because they have spectral deck packs and spectral cards can show up in the shop. There are no spectral cards that straight-up give you more cards. You have to destroy one card to get two enhanced aces, or three or four enhanced cards (depending on the spectral card).
The other meta is to hopefully find the DNA joker because that duplicates one card per round and either Blueprint or Brainstorm (copies the joker to the right and to the leftmost, respectively) to copy that one card. Or both! Then you get two cards. Of course, if you’re using your Blueprint and/or Brainstorm to copy a card, that means it’s not helping you win the hand. No, I’m not trying to win these runs, but I have to survive long enough to get the achievement.
The other other meta is to get really lucky and be able to buy the Magic Trick voucher in the shop. That allows playing cards to appear in the shop, which, obviously, means you can buy them. And they’re only a buck, so it’s usually pretty feasible to buy them. The upgraded version of Magic Trick can only be unlcoked if you buy 20 cards in the shop (doesn’t have to be in one run, fortunately). But you have to find Magic Trick on a run and then be able to last the run until you have the economy to buy the cards you need–and they show up.. There are playing card packs, too.
It was taking forever. I read a cheese in which once you buy Magic Trick and find a card in the shop, you can buy it, quit out the game, and restart. When you do, you will be back to the beginning of the shop but with the game registering that you bought the card, and you can do this repeatedly until you have the 20 cards you need. Someone on that thread was sniffily saying that it’s considered cheating in ‘the community’, but as someone else pointed out, who the fuck cared? It was not online/community play, so why gatekeep like that? And really, for that accomplishment, it was ludicrous and a waste of time.
Which as I’ve mentioned before is one of my issues with plat achievements. Oftentimes, they are made grueling just because. Buying twenty playing cards isn’t a sign of skill at all–it’s just luck and grinding. I would have gotten it eventually, but why the fuck would I want to do that? That’s not fun at all.
This is the bottom line. Games are supposed to be fun. Doing collectibles is not fun. I’m sure there are some people who find it fun, but most people do not. And for someone like me, it can really mess with my mind because I have OCD tendencies that I have a hard time keeping under control.
I just have this achievement, the one to do all the challenges, nad the two gold stakes/stickers-based ones that I will never do. If I manage to get this one and do all the challenges, I will consider that my personal plat.
I’m in that ‘I feel sick from eating too much sweet stuff’ stage that I always get into with a game I really like. I have very poor impulse control, and if I like something, I gorge on it until I get sick. Then I never want to ‘eat’ it again.
What is my final verdict on this game? Let me reiterate that I have two different rating systems. One is for FromSoft games and the other is for all other games (mostly indies). Why? Because all FromSoft games are above all other games so it would be unfair to rate them with the same system. My least favorite FromSoft game (outside of Armored Core VI Fires of the Rubicon, which I don’t count because I could not play it with my limited abilities) is Sekiro, and I would still give it a 9. My favorite From game (and therefore my favorite game overall) is Elden Ring most of the time and Dark Souls III the rest of the time because it is just that close, and I give both of them a 9.75 (or so).
My two favorite non-From gamesa are Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall) and Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games), and I would give each of them a 9.5 or close to it. But as I said, they are completely different scales and never shall they meet.
Thus, I have to rate Balatro on the indie (non-From) scale. It’s so addictive in that Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (Edmund McMillen) way, but weirdly, I would not give BoI:R over a 9 even though it’s the game I’ve played the most. Whereas Hades (the original, Supergiant Games), a game I played much less, but enjoyed more–and platted mostly in an organic way. It was such a special experience, I’m trepidatious about the sequel which is in Early Access. Can it live up to the first one? I fear it may not. I have been studiously ignoring everything about it beacuse I like to go into games with as little prior knowledge as possible.
I was going to throw out a score, but I think I will wait until the next post for that and end this here.