I see a decent amount of people have been complaining about the new brawler and honestly I completely disagree. The new one perfectly captures the basic mechanics of the old version, while adding just enough complexity to it to make it more interesting. And it honestly perfectly fits with the MC's progression in fighting, with the introduction of distinguishing blocks from dodges shows how the MC is learning how to use both effectively. If you're having a rough time and are on normal difficulty, my recommendation is to get your stamina to 3 and if you have any extra skillpoints I personally prioritized power and then counter, but if you're on hard difficulty or having issues with timing you might want speed. Rage is underpowered right now and I think it's better to conserve your stamina for dodges so you can get more hits off without taking too much damage from blocking. It's fine to use the strong punches that use stamina sometimes, but it's important that you're getting a dodge almost every time or else higher-level opponents are probably just gonna hit you enough times to knock you out even if you are successfully blocking. If you are doing it on hard mode then I think you just gotta swallow your pride and lower the difficulty, I was 7 for 7 on normal mode so you should be able to do it fairly easily on normal.
As far as the other minigames here's my opinion:
Math: It's fine I guess, I kinda liked the IQ test questions in the last chapter, but I really don't have a preference for either, they take about the same amount of brainpower. The only downside of this minigame is that it's harder to cheat (literally, not in game) so if you play multiple playthroughs and you don't have all minigames turned off then you can't just easily skip through these tests like you could in the past.
English: DPC finally added the ability to type your answers and still somehow fucked it up lmao. At least in my opinion the timer goes down so much quicker; obviously the timer would be faster now that we can type but I don't think its balanced very well.
Science: Good minigame, not much to complain about, arguably too easy but we shall see if that holds true in future versions.
Beer Pong: Worst minigame in the entire update. What little strategy there is in the minigame doesn't make the minigame fun at all imo, it's just an RNG fest. I get what DPC was going for, but it really just felt like a placeholder of a minigame. If I could make it differently, I would make Arc Shots require you to do 3 of DPC's classic slider games (you know, like with the pancake minigame in past episodes) one for accuracy, one for power, and one for the arc; hitting all 3 gets you a cup. If you really wanted to go above and beyond, instead of just sliders you can do a graphic that shows an image of your opponents remaining cups then an indicator that slides left and right across the board, then up and down, and then if both sliders lined up to a cup you would get an arc slider which operates similar to the regular one, you just have to hit the "sweet spot". In that case, similar to real beer pong, you can miss the cup you were aiming for and still hit a cup nearby. Then I'd give you the option for Bullet Shots (Fastball) where you have just one slider for accuracy but it has a significantly smaller sweet spot that you have to hit. And then if you want to add Bounce Shots you can do the RNG there, so at least you have the option not to rely on RNG. When the other player is shooting you can keep the same "tease" or "focus" options, but instead of just changing the RNG they shrink (or increase) the sweet spot for the sliders (and modify the RNG for Bounce Shots). If you wanna add the whole "Action Points" functionality to it, you can keep that for Bounce Shots and then you just have to figure out how to balance that so Bounce Shots feel worthwhile enough to justify requiring AP for. -- Thats just the bare minimum imo, but you could also add the "drunk effect" that some beer pong games have had in the past, where your shots get more difficult the more cups your opponent has made (shrinking the sweet spot in your sliders), or you could add the ability to personally block your opponents' Bounce Shots similar to the counter QTE in the Brawler minigame.
Party Planning: Not a new minigame, nor has anything really been added to this version, but I've never liked how there are so many different board layouts. All layouts are not made equally and if I get a bad one then I just get fucked with it and have to deal with it. Why? Why can't you just make one layout that you feel is a reasonable difficulty? Just so it's harder for people to look up the perfect solution and just do that? Why do you care how people play your single player game so much? If someone wants to do that, go ahead... and if you want to challenge yourself, you can do that too. That's the point of a game...
