I still have things to say about Balatro (LocalThunk), so this is the (probably) last post on the game. In the last post, I mentioned that I knew the game was deep, but I was having more and more dissatisfaction with how deep the game was. I mentioned that it took actual days to get two Legendary Jokers, which made the game not fun at all. In fact, in reading up on the best way to do it, someone said that you should just play the game and not worry about it because focusing on those kinds of things took the fun out of the game.
It’s so true. I just sat there mechanically playing the game, feeling no joy in my heart. I know the grind is real, but this grind felt so unnecessary. It really should not have been that hard to unlock them or that random. I mentioned in the last post how Baldur’s Gate 3 has something that I now know is Karmic Dice. I thought it meant it made your rolls better so you won’t have a truly terrible bad streak of rolls, but apparently, it also makes enemies roll better? Apparently, it’s a heated option, and there are arguments on both sides.
I do think in general, though, that the idea of bending the rolls (yes, rolls, not rules) so that the player does not fail a 90% roll three or four times in a row is fair play in a video game. I know that’s not how probabilities actually work, but I’m not going to play a game that does that to me over and over again. I know there are people who feel differently, which is why it should be an option and not the default.
In Balatro, I felt empty when I got the last Legendary. Relief, yes, but also just an intense weariness. It really should not have been like that, and while I realize that my luck was exceptionally bad, I can’t forget the hours upon hours upon hours of grinding I had to do to get two Legendary Jokers, neither of which I actually like. In addition, those two Legendaries are so specific, they’re pretty much useless. Well, not useless, but not very helpful.
*SPOILER*
You know what is a good Joker I slept on? And quite possibly the best overall Joker in the game? Hanging Chad. It’s a Common, and it replicates your first card twice (so you get all the effects of the first card three times. This includes any modifiers that card has and any other Jokers that are affected by the card. I didn’t know how powerful it was until I was going for my last Joker–Stuntman.
I knew as soon as I read the requirement to unlock this Joker that it would be really hard for me. Why? Because you need to get 100,000,000 chips in one hand. In one hand. I had to repeat that because it seemed impossible to me. The highest I’d gotten was 7 mill, and that was once. How the hell was I going to get 100,00,000 in one fucking hand? Oh, and the 7 mill was not one hand–it was one blind–which meant four or five hands.
The video I included above is by a guy who is really good at the game. This is his beginner’s tips video, and he mentions Hanging Chad in it, which makes it perfect for this post. He also mentioned two tips that I had not thought of/known, and both of them really helped me.
One was that there is a high contrast mode. This makes the Diamonds yellow and the Clubs blue, which is such a godsend! He even mentions about how it saves you from messing up a Flush, which I have done more than once. I turned it on, and my goodness, it helped so much. I will not play it any other way from now on. The other was if you get planet cards that you don’t want, instead of selling them or using them, anyway, put them in your consumable slots because that blocks them from showing up again. I had no idea that was the case!
I tried my best with the Plasma Deck (it adds up all the points and then divides them equally rather than keep the chips and multipliers separate. I knew the meta was that if you wanted to get the high numbers, this was the deck to use. For regular runs, you should focus on either high chips or high plus multipliers early in the run, and then switch to multiplicative multipliers in the late game.
I tried dozens of runs and didn’t get close. I interspersed this with trying to get my first orange stake win (again, the stakes from lowest to higehst are red (no money earned on small blinds); green (higher scores after first ante); black (30% chance a joker will have an Eternal sticker, which means you can’t get rid of it); blue (-1 discard); purple (even higher scores after the first ante); orange (30% chance a joker will have a Perishable sticker, which means it defuffs (no longer works) after 5 played rounds); and gold (30% chance a joker will have a Rental sticker, which means you can rent it for a dollar, and then it costs three dollars a round.
Hm. In reading the Wiki, none of these show up as rewards so yet another reason to skip blinds when jokers are the reward.
With the Blue Deck, I cruised through all the stokes up to blue. I had some trouble with purple, but when I beat it, I beat it very comfortably. In fact, that seemed to be the case with all the higher stakes–I struggled with them until I absolutely smashed it on the run in which I won. I got stuck on the orange stake for quite some time. I was not having any fun, and I seriously wondered if I would beat it.
I was flipping back and forth between trying to unlock Stuntman and winning on orange stake with the Blue Deck. I finally gave in and looked up different ways to get the Stuntman, plus I got some tips in the Balatro channel on the RKG Discord. I realized I had to completely change my build, which meant going out of my comfort zone.
Looks like I have one more post in me. Will write it tomorrow.