I finished Lollipop Chainsaw last night.  I don’t have much to add to my comments from the other day – in general, it’s a pretty good brawler with a twisted sense of humor – but I wanted to point out two things in particular.

First, it’s pretty clearly telegraphed from the start that the five bosses you know about aren’t the REAL enemies, and that there was going to be a Super Big Bad Secret Boss after them.  This was not a surprise.  The NATURE of the Super Big Bad Secret Boss, on the other hand, was entirely unexpected and I am hesitant to reveal it for fear of ruining the experience for others.

I will say simply that it was pretty spectacular.

The Big Bad Secret Boss fight DOES end with a “press the X button to not die” QTE, and failing it makes you start the whole fight from the beginning, but I’ll forgive it because knowing what to do made the fight before the QTE much quicker the second time.

Second, the game has a “good” ending and a “bad” ending, and this is normally the sort of thing that makes me give a game very poor marks, because getting the “good” ending all-to-often revolves around doing stuff that is a pain in the arse at best and straight-up-artificial longevity at the worst.  Fatal Frame II, for example, even though it’s probably in my top ten games of all time, requires the player to finish the game on the very highest difficulty setting – which isn’t even available to you until you’ve completed the game a couple of times.

The “good” ending in Lollipop Chainsaw, by way of contrast, just requires you to save a few classmates from zombies over the course of the game, and I’d already saved all but one of them just as a side effect of playing aggressively.  Saving the one I’d missed was a simple matter of replaying the level I’d missed her on, rescuing her from zombies, and then quitting the level after the next checkpoint – I didn’t have to restart the game, or even replay the level in its entirety.

It’s a pretty short game – I doubt I clocked more than about 6 hours spread out over three nights – but does have some stuff you can do after the ending credits roll, if you’re in the mood to get more zombie chainsawing in.  I might have felt a little short-changed if I’d paid sixty bucks for it, of course, but looking at my Amazon history shows that it cost me a hair under twenty bucks, which is just about perfect for this sort of experience.

It also shows that I waited 10 months between buying it and actually taking it out of the shrinkwrap and slotting it into a PS3, but that’s probably a little better than my average, all-in-all.