Of all four cog bosses, the CJ has gotta be my least favorite. There is so much it wants to do but it just barely lands in each thing it tries. (Also this will mostly be from the pov of a new player doing a CJ for the first time)
THE SETUP
The courthouse is honestly the perfect setting for lawbot. Where else would it be? My gripe here is with Bumpy. How is this one toon ALWAYS on trial?? I know he’s supposed to be the toon that guides you in the fight, but, like, what happens to him when you win? How do the cogs keep getting him back into trial? Why do they hate this one guy that much?
THE COG FIGHT
Now, the first phase when you simply fight cogs is the most straightforward, so it’s pretty fine. What I don’t like however is after you win, you gotta watch CJ slowly roll his way onto his podium then slooowly rise to the top. Much like when the VP “escapes” during his fight, there’s this giant gap of downtime right in the middle of the boss.
THE CANNONS
Each boss has its “gimmick” during its fight. That one thing you can only do during that fight and “mostly” nowhere else. VP is you throw pies to push him off the building. CFO has the magnet cranes. CEO has you serving cogs food. With CJ, you fire out of cannons to seat jurors. This wouldn’t be a problem is you weren’t strictly punished for doing that very thing. The more toons you fire out of cannons, the more cogs will spawn in to take seats. This causes an entire pace breaker where everyone has to manipulate the cogs by NOT shooting for a majority of the phase. Ofc, this causes problems among the toon players.
Maybe to fix this, have the cogs always fly in on their own set patterns, unaffected by what the toons do. Perhaps, when a cog is seated, they need one toon shot at them to destroy that cog and empty the seat, THEN the next toon to hit that seat is seated. Basically, more cogs flying in, but now toons are free to fire as much as they can/want.
Back to the jurors though, one thing I hate is that it’s not entirely obvious WHY you should be doing this. Having a full toon jury makes the scale in the next phase balanced, instead of in the cogs favor. But you don’t even know of this scale until AFTER. And yeah, Bumpy explains what’s happening, but we don’t see it! The CJ fight is a whole lot of tell/don’t show and the dialogue can easily be skipped past on accident.
Maybe during the cannons phase, there could be a visual on screen showing how “strong” your jury is. A bar that starts empty, but as you seat jurors, it fills, and as cogs steal seats, it lowers. Basically a scale before the real scale.
THE SCALE
The scale phase is my least favorite. Right as you’re done listening to Bumpy, you’re just thrown right in. Everything is happening at once. All the toons are squished together right by the scale, cogs are standing around, throwing evidence, gavels are everywhere. It’s just too much thrown at once. To a new player, they may not even know what to do even if they listened to Bumpy. It’s not immediately obvious where Bumpy is in this very distracting environment. All the stands are the same texture, so how would one simply guess that touching the one he’s sitting at gives you exactly what you need to progress? There should be a more obvious tell for what you’re interacting with when getting evidence from Bumpy instead of just…a wall.
With stunning, I’m not even sure if you’re ever told you can stun the cogs. Bumpy brushes it off with a “you CAN hit the lawyers” but doesn’t imply how important that could be or that stunning all of them rewards you. That’s told to you AFTER you do that very thing! And stunning all the cogs to get double weight is VERY important to make things easier!
And with throwing evidence into the pan, you can tell the original team were low on ideas since they basically reused to whole pie throwing thing from the VP fight.
The pan itself also feels very unsatisfying. It moves so slowly. Even squinting and looking very closely at it, it just moves an inch at a time. It never feels like you’re making any real progress. And the fact that if you’re not stunning and simply hitting the pan, you just gotta keep throwing, and throwing, and throwing… At least with the VP, there was obvious progress when hitting him with the pies as he is pushed back.
Also if you’re hitting the pan, there’s no good tell for whether or not a lawyer is aiming at the pan or a toon. If you’re stunning, there’s cog will obviously turn to look at you, but if you’re by the pan, the lawyers are still gonna be looking at the pan. So you have to always juggle mindlessly spamming evidence and looking over when the lawyers are about to throw.
All of this mind you, as giant gavels are everywhere, giving less and less wiggle room. These wouldn’t be a problem if ALL of these things together weren’t added up.
The scale itself needs some sense of progression. Perhaps at certain “checkpoints” when the scale lowers, it could be acknowledged by either Bumpy or the CJ, saying “hey you’re getting farther”. Maybe the scale could shake a little bit as to say “you’ve hit the checkpoint”.
And when the scale hits the bottom, there’s no real fanfare or resolution. That leads into-
THE VICTORY
For a “victory”, this does NOT feel victorious. The game kinda just abruptly ends and cuts to the CJ. And he just…LEAVES??? Just walks away???? All the other bosses have some sort of comeuppance. VP falls off the building, CFO is destroyed by a train, CEO gets demoted to Flunky. And CJ just says “welp I’m off” and walks away…
What if instead he could still be in shock that the toon defense won, but then he looks around and a giant gavel falls on him, destroying him before he can make an escape. The CJ is now given a comeuppance and it fits with the courthouse theming.
THE REWARD
As per usual, the CJ reward is the least useful and worth it. The cog summons are fine as they are, but doing ALL of that for a single telemarketer summon is NOT worth it.
The way I’d change it, give out two to three summons, with a CHANCE at an invasion summon. The usual summons would be either a single cog or building, of course.
The summons, however, could also get a little buff. Let us hold multiple of the same summons. Like 10. You can get multiple of the same cog/building, making it feel more worth having. Now you can spawn more to your liking. NOT INVASIONS THO. The invasions can be like level 7 gags where you can only have the 1 earned. Once you use that invasion summon, THEN you can get another of it.
All the other boss rewards are worth it for what you do to get them. Pretty much all sos cards are worth it to your whole to when you use one. You’re given a handful of pink slips per CEO defeated. Don’t even get me started on how useful Unites are. Meanwhile cog summons are just filler. Besides people that are dedicated to get and use them, I don’t think anyone is really all that excited about them. MAKE them exciting.
Please let me know what anyone else thinks about my thoughts and this fight in general. I can only hope the dev team tries SOMETHING new with CJ without flat out replacing him.