Depending on one’s outlook of what December entails, “the holiday spirit” looks a whole lot different for some people than it does for others.


As in, some people feel as if the holiday spirit has evil intent, having violently entered their body, and are now in immediate need of an exorcist to expel the yuletide demon with extreme prejudice

Yesterday, I took a weird left turn into detour land, as I decided to dive into some of the more tertiary aspects of Expedition (E33), as I felt as if I needed to shift focuses slightly from just discussing the games ample usage of the parry mechanic…and, in a moment of radical honesty, did not really have a much better idea at the ready to shift focuses to, then discussing the absurdist futility the minigames of E33 represented.

Rereading some of my more recent articles on the matter, I don’t feel as if I’ve necessarily written in extraordinarily derivative pretense with regards to honing in on just how vital parrying is to the whole affair, but it’s nice to get a change of pace every once in awhile. To that point, minigames quite literally are designed from the ground up with this notion in mind, and with E33 being cut from the same majestic cloth as old school Final Fantasy was, it was only a matter of time before I stumbled into the absurd incarnate once again.

The first of the two minigames I had stumbled upon thus far, and the one I detailed yesterday, took the form of an Obstacle Course (OC), which I routinely cited as “stern, but fair”, though I am mindful of the fact that my description of said minigame may have been gracefully charitable in some regard, as I may be gracing the OC with a far warmer sentiment than most would likely grant it. I think this is due to a number of reasons, one of which is a sizeable streak of patience I possess, this is in large part a direct result of me having come from the old school of arcade infamy, so contending with janky ass systems that put the player through abject misery is kind of my jam. In any case, my awkward sprint across the “water logged” sensibilities of the OC, eventually saw me to well earned success, continuing on my journey not long after. It was not until what felt like an entire lifetime there after, that I encountered minigame #2, and the one that ended up being the greater “test of might” to my own wayward sense of jank-adjacent proclivities.

The might testing of note, came in the form of what the game refers to as “Volleyball”, though the actual exchange feels so abstractly removed from Volleyball, that any number of other entitlements would have worked in better favor of either accurate or more entertaining descriptor, as the activity *really, really* has very little to do with Volleyball at all. Due to reasons that are about to become radically distinct in nature, I’m more inclined to refer to minigame #2 as “Jank Ball”, as it pretty much gets the point across of what one has to look forward to in this sordid, sorrowful beach related sadness one is about to sourly assault themselves with.

With that said, the rules of Jank Ball (JB) still remain quite straight forward, though unlike the OC, with all of its mad platforming like machinations involving floating log zaniness, albeit in only one limited configuration, JB does offer three difficulty levels, (Easy, Medium, Hard), so that one has a chance to “warm up” I suppose, and maybe more so to give the players a greater feeling of progression, as they slowly get the hang of the ins and outs of JB, and what one will have to tolerate, in order to succeed. Though, as implied by the title, and maybe even more so than the OC, patience will be one of the greatest virtues, in tackling the morbidly stilted nature, of the controls in question, related to JB.

The setup is as follows: the arena is in open water, with you vs your opponent, each of you across from the other, on your own floating raft. Unlike volleyball, which allows both players to err…volley the ball (goodness gracious) back and forth at each other, JB just sees your opponent essentially launching projectiles at you, as if out of a cannon, directly at your floating vessel. The projectiles in question are actually youthful versions of creatures named “gestrals”, which are kind of like wooden fae folk of sorts. Not that this detail truly matters, but it does kind of paint a more hilarious picture of the exchange in question, in that instead of just a run of the mill giant fucking ball being launched your way, multiple sentient children like entities are being lobbed at you at extremely high speeds, so it is kind of hilarious in that regard.

The kid gestrals can be launched at the player from three different angles, and thankfully, those three angles all have the exact same point of entry, which, sounds limiting and too predictable, but I’ve yet to mention the “ease of control” related to “volleying” the kid gestrals back. I used a conjugated version of the word volley there, but once again, you’re most or less “magically punching” the ever loving shit, falcon punch style, the kid gestrals back to their target, so it does not in anyway shape or from feel like a volley whatsoever, very much in the same way the kid gestrals are balls in conceptual mobility alone, but these are the realities we have to contend with when entering the Jank Ball arena.

Refocusing on why those three points of entry previously mentioned for said projectiles to essentially “enter” from becomes so thankful a reality, is due to the “volleying mechanism” aka the magical punch, and the tedious frustration involved with actually connecting a hit. This is due to many reasons, one of which involves the magical punch needing a second to charge in-between uses, but for another unfortunate reason, this volley in question possesses an extraordinarily limited area of range that it covers in your attempts of countering said kid gestral related projectiles. Not only does this magical punch lack any serious sense of reasonable execution range, and its execution is not immediate in its usage, you are limited in just how you must position your body to even get a chance to land a punch on the kid gestral to begin with, further complicating the situation. Within that regard, and the biggest problem in why any round of JB feels so brutal, is due to the extremely…well, janky nature of Jank Ball, as you can only take what the game considers “4 hits”, as in, 4 missed “volleys”, before you are down to your final and fifth hit, which will blow up your raft upon impact. I put “4 hits” in quotations, because there are two different variants of projectiles that can be launched at you, one worth only a single hit of damage, and another worth 2, so if you are unable to stop two of the more damaging ones, a meager third hit will be enough to sink you. When one considers just how janky everything is to contend with in JB, you quickly realized just how regrettably short JB rounds are, as even on easy mode, the enemy has a lot more health than just a measely few hit points with which to contend with.

When you add in the notion that the varying levels of difficulty add more projectiles, and increase the enemy rafts “hit points”, so to speak, so that you will need to volley a shitton of kid gestrals back there way, getting a win on JB feels few and far between. If you hadn’t picked up on it already, I don’t have a great deal of regard for JB, as it represents, in its purest form, a sheer distillation of patience on display, as most of your time with JB, will literally just relate to you understanding how the fuck one is even suppose to use such broke ass standards to compete in this janky bastard of a game. Jank Ball isn’t so much a minigame for fun to be had with, but utterly and truly a time sink of questionable value, as interacting with it is not something I would refer to as “traditional fun”, but more so, a bizarre test of reflex and quiet resolve.

Jank Ball wasn’t so busted of a concept that I needed to take a break during the length of time it ook me in besting all three difficulty levels, but boy, did it feel like a grand epoch of cosmic measurement in getting it done, due to the abhorrent lack of real value beyond mindless distraction. In some ways, it kind of reminds me of the “ball and cup” game one plays as a kid, where one attempts to use a flick of the rest to influence the gravity of the string attached to the ball to land in said cup. I never found the game to be all that fun, but due to some warped version of a “sunk cost fallacy”, in exerting an inane amount of ego in doing it “right”, one applies themselves to the activity to get it at least once before moving on.

So yeah. Those are the two minigames I’ve thus far found in Expedition 33. Kind of weak, all things considered, and I’m still crossing my fingers E33 has a card game up its sleeve to throw my way at some point, but I’m already 15 hours in, which feels like an awful long time to wait to whip out something in regards to the magnitude of a card game, so I will likely have to accept my disappointment in the matter and move on.

No game is perfect, after all…especially not Jank Ball.

~Pashford