Lym

So I've played bits and pieces of Bug Fables ever since it came out in late 2019 and enjoyed it quite a bit. The easy way to descibe it is that it's like the original paper Mario, but with bugs, which is both accurate - the game very much wears its inspiration on its sleeve - and doesn't do it justice at all, because "just a Paper Mario clone" doesn't tell you just how charming these bugs are. I'm quite attached to Vi the bee, with her little beemerang and her big chip on her shoulder about snobby fellow bees, Kabbu the beetle with a Tragic Past and a love for the in-universe equivalent of the power rangers, and Leif the moth who somehow woke up generations past his time, with new ancient magics and an old fondness for cute pets.

It's fun to play, too, but as someone who likes Paper Mario okay but doesn't love it, I was never quite in love with the battle system. This changes a few weeks ago when I restarted the game and did something I almost never do - I turned on Hard Mode.

In this game, "hard mode" is an equipable item that'll make fights harder, but also makes enemies drop more money/items/exp, and if you defeat bosses and certain mini-bosses with it on, you even get unique skills and stuff. One problem I had with the battle system before was that I didn't want to use my items (or MP-using skills when I was away from an inn other other heal point) because oh no, what if I run out?? And that then made battles needlessly annoying.

Hard mode fixed that - the extra rewards mean that I actually "have" to use my items to make space in my inventory for all the additional drops, and because I'm expecting the game to be harder, I also don't get annoyed at a previously annoying enemy, or at having to cook some new meals before I go into a dungeon. So it's a mix of being in the right mindset, and the balance of items used vs items received fitting better into my newly-adjusted playstyle.

(That's not just me, right? That sometimes your expectations for how easy or hard a game is going to be shapes your reaction to a difficult fight?)

It helps that this isn't just the sort of hard mode where enemies just turn into damage sponges and that's it. Every enemy was manually adjusted. Some just hit harder, others do that and have more HP, some have an extra defence point that changes how you need to approach them quite a bit, and some bosses even get new skills. (I just fought one who's a damage race to begin with, and who, on hard mode only, gets an additional bit of defence when he first drops to 25% HP and that really made me think about what to do.)

As someone who's rarely into a games for the challenge aspect, I'm having a great time with it now, and am finally enjoying the battle side of Bug Fables as much as the story, characters and exceptionally hummable music. And now excuse me, I have to help Vi and her sister make up via a surprisingly charming trading sidequest...