Indivisible's First Paid DLC: Is It Worth Your Money?
Less than a month after the free New Game+/Couch Co-op update for Indivisible comes a paid DLC: Razmi’s Challenges. I rarely buy DLC, unless I’m buying the game-of-the-year edition, but being the Indivisible fanboy that I am, I wanted to get some further gameplay out of it. I’ll be going over a quick rundown of what the DLC is about, and let you determine whether it’s worth your time (and definitely, your wallet) by sharing my thoughts on it.
Razmi – one of the characters that Ajna encounters early on in her journey – has set up a tent in Ajna’s inner realm (i.e. inside her head). This tent evidently allows Razmi to create challenges for Ajna to complete – a total of forty, using a mixture of platforming and battle elements. A clock will be ticking, and the faster the challenge is cleared, the better ranking you’ll get. And that’s pretty much all there is to it.
My first gripe is that, for whatever reason, after I bought it, the DLC wasn’t showing up in my library. I contacted one of the Lab Zero members about it, and sometime later I was told to restart Steam. I did, and then it was there. A bit strange, and naturally when I asked what the deal was, I was told, “I choose not to get into details. But it wasn’t malice.” I’m guessing the Linux version of the DLC hadn’t been uploaded to Steam yet.
Certain abilities have to be unlocked in order to play some of the challenges. Other challenges will make Ajna pretty barebones in what she can do – she might not be able to use her bow, her spear, or dash through obstacles. And, for some reason, her palette will be colored differently.
As far as battles go, some characters in the party will be mixed up. For example, one challenge might include Ajna, Baozhai, Zebei, and Razmi. Others will include the former three, but replace Razmi with Hunoch. Characters are limited to three attacks each; any progress you’ve made in the story doesn’t carry on here, including stats.
Many of the platforming challenges can be done in thirty seconds or less. This is, assuming, that you didn’t retry the same challenge over again because Ajna fell. And that’s something you’ll frankly have to repeat often, because you only learn the course as you go about it. You’ll have to learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat them on the next run.
Even then, another frustrating element is the spikes that are scattered throughout most of the platforming challenges. Colliding with most of them will cause instant death and even if you’re close to the end, you’ll have to start all over from the beginning.
The spike balls have huge hitboxes, a little bigger than necessary. What I mean by this, is say for example Ajna is trying to air-dash in the space between two spike balls. Timing has to be just right; going just a little above the lower spike or a little lower than the upper spike will cause collision, even though she’s not even close to it. I can already tell you from the screenshot below, she won’t make it because she’ll collide with the top spike.
The battles I don’t have much complaint with. In fact, I do like that they get you to learn a character you may have never used before. That being said, there’s still more variety could have been done here, other than having to perfect block nearly every attack in order to keep your party member alive.
I bought the DLC yesterday and managed to finish all the challenges in a few hours. If I wanted to I could go back and beat the challenges as fast as possible to earn a Platinum ranking, but it’s not worth the time. And I’ll go ahead and spoil this: the reward that you’ll get after clearing all the challenges? A gold-colored palette for Ajna.
So is it worth the $8? No. The platforming challenges aren’t that unique besides being frustrating, and is something that I honestly could have made myself in my sleep. This could have just been baked into the main game as an update. Wait for the DLC to go on sale (and by that I mean cheaper than the 10% off it is right now) if you still want to try it.