WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR COOKIE RUN KINGDOM’S STORY MODE UP TO THE BEGINNING OF EPISODE 11

DISCLAIMER: Despite containing criticisms and praise, this is not a review. I haven’t experienced all the game’s content yet. This is simply a discussion piece surrounding the product’s general design and my personal experience thus far.

Has a valued loved one ever spat in your drink? Well, I recently endured a similar experience, except with an Iphone app that features a cookie where the main ingredient is the bodily fluids of a fish, instead of my little brother. And I’m here to talk about that experience.

If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you probably already know what my opinions are on Cookie Run Kingdom. It’s one of my favorite games of all time; gorgeous graphics, many different types of satisfying gameplay all in one big package, and a butt-ton of cute little characters to collect, populate your very own kingdom with and force into combat against spiky oranges with feet. It’s got it all. But you know what they say, even the most skilled and efficient waiters will occasionally spill your beer all over the carpet. And in what form does this game stain its own hairy floor? In the story mode. Specifically, the second Dark Enchantress Cookie encounter.

For those of you who don’t play the game, Dark Enchantress Cookie is the main villain of this game’s story mode. And all throughout, she’s built up as this looming danger that threatens to swallow the entire world in her reign. Her backstory is chilling, yet sympathetic. And after everything she endured and all the history she’s had with other characters, you’re encountering her for the second time at the end of episode ten of the story mode, where she’s now the strongest she’s ever been. And after all that buildup, does the game give you a satisfying boss battle that challenges all the skills you’ve built up over the course of the game so far and leaves you feeling like you’ve accomplished something meaningful?

If you’ve paid attention so far, what the heck do you think?

In order to discuss why this boss battle sucked the life out of me, we need to talk about Cookie Run Kingdom’s game design in general. In the world exploration gamemode, you have a team of five cookies, each from one of eight classes and with their own unique abilities and stats. In order to beat a level, you have to use this team to defeat enemies, one wave at a time. Sounds simple enough. Each cookie has a special attack that charges overtime, usually taking between ten and twenty seconds to fully charge, and once it does, you have to tap on it to release their special attack and… That’s it.

This probably sounds like it couldn’t get more painfully basic and easy if it tried, but most of the strategy comes from the assembling of the team itself. Some enemies will inflict harmful debuffs on your cookies, so you use a cookie with debuff immunity to combat that. Some enemies have extra devastating attack damage, so you use cookies with high defense. You can even attach treasures to your team that behave similarly. It’s all about countering your enemies, and it’s simple, yet fun. And how do you think this boss battle tests your strategizing in this regard?

Well, when it came time to make this boss battle, the game designers at Devsisters threw their hands in the air and just dumped everything into giving Enchantress an ungodly amount of health and absolutely nothing else. It’s not like she has any unique attacks or abilities that you need to use your brain to combat and defend yourself from, she just has an outright monstrous amount of health. That’s it. The developers just threw her out the window.

I don’t need to explain why it sucks. You already know exactly why. There’s no strategy, you don’t need to use your brain, you just have to use your highest attack stat cookies and treasures and hope for the best. And if your cookies don’t have enough attack points to put an end to this giant spindly mistake, the process of leveling up your cookies without the world exploration gamemode is the literal gulag. All you can do is log in everyday until your daily reward EXP builds up to the point where you can level up your cookies. For me personally, this process took OVER A MONTH. OVER A MONTH OF INSIPID GRINDING, just to knock over what is essentially a glorified roadblock.

It’s not all bad, though, because the cutscene that you get after FINALLY getting rid of this greasy old wart in an underweight mech is extremely satisfying and fulfilling as an ending to this chapter of the story. It’s so great to see Pure Vanilla Cookie and the Vanilla Kingdom finally at peace, and the way they tie the journey you’ve made in building your kingdom into everything is honestly the best part. It’s one of my favorite moments in the whole story mode. And it’s also great because now, after that painful experience, you get to embark on a whole new chapter where you begin your quest to find Pure Vanilla Cookie’s friends! So now, it’s time to continue our quest to- … Wait, I lost? Oh well, it must have been a tie. Time to exit the level and move on to the next… Oh, wait, I didn’t actually beat the level?

Now, you tell me. After all that suffering and grinding and finally seemingly beating the boss and being given the final cutscene, yet STILL failing in the end because you defeated them a single millisecond after the timer went off and not being able to progress, does going back to the endless grinding to get strong enough sound fun? Or fair? This honestly makes this ending feel like a total joke at your expense, and it just goes to show how much the game designers didn’t care about paying off everything you’ve invested into world exploration up to this point and just gave up and abandoned you. From that perspective, it’s one of the most depressing boss fights of all time, actually.

So after enduring every cycle of hell and going through all eleven stages of grief, you FINALLY beat the level, and it doesn’t feel remotely satisfying because you’ve already seen the ending prior. And even though the worst is over gameplay-wise, that doesn’t mean the pain stops there, because here is where the problems with the story itself start to surface.

You start episode 11 and immediately you’re given a cutscene that has NOTHING to do with Gingerbrave or any of the characters we’ve met so far and is instead a conversation between two characters we’ve literally never seen before talking about things we know nothing about. OKAY?? To remind you, up to this point, everything that we’ve experienced in the story has been mostly Gingerbrave and the gang’s journey through THEIR perspective. Sure there are a few scenes that don’t feature them, but they all featured characters that we had already been introduced to prior. We went through all that, and we don’t even get to see how Gingerbrave’s story continues at the start. Okay, now this is just a full-on circus at your expense. The game just switches POVs with no warning, and it just throws all your investment out the window. What a great reward! What makes it worse is that the buildup up to this point of exploring the Hollyberry Kingdom and finding Hollyberry Cookie herself is basically non-existent, unlike the Vanilla Kingdom, which was constantly being built up throughout the game so far. Most of Dark Enchantress’s backstory is built around her relationship with Pure Vanilla Cookie!

This leads into a bigger problem with this game’s story. Episodes 5-8 are mainly dedicated to building up Pure Vanilla Cookie’s backstory and how he ties into the story’s main conflict. Vanilla Cookie is the only one of the five ancient hero cookies the story really explores in this sense.  The fact that it gets so much buildup makes episodes 9-10 pretty great story-wise, but all of this does come at a pretty significant cost. Everything that follows just feels flaccid. It is a BASIC RULE OF STORY STRUCTURE, and they couldn’t even get that right. The other four ancient cookies, despite playing significant roles in this world, only have their faces shown in two or three cutscenes throughout episodes 1-10. And whenever they’re referenced outside of that, they’re never named. In fact, I think the only time they’re referred to by name is all the way in the prologue. You could literally cut out the rest of the ancient cookies, and the story wouldn’t change. Maybe that was the point, but that doesn’t make it good writing. Because of this, the segway into episode 11 is literally non-existent, because it was never mentioned prior. It wouldn’t even have taken that much to do. All they needed was a cutscene where Pure Vanilla Cookie acknowledges that Dark Enchantress Cookie might return, and that they’re gonna need to find the rest of the ancients in order to stop her. ANYTHING would have been better than this. The immediate segway into the next kingdom makes for a pretty bad pacing problem, too. After we traveled for eight episodes to get to the Vanilla Kingdom, we immediately arrived in Hollyberry land with literally nothing happening in between, like, WHAT? How did we get there so quickly?? So not only is your journey thus far capped off with a completely unfair final boss, but the game can’t even wash out the bad taste afterwards. What a joke.

I could honestly go on and on about this, but not only would that go way off-topic, but there’s still story content yet to be released, so we’ll just have to wait and see if the game’s story cleans itself up. And I really hope it does.

So after all of that, it probably sounds like I hate this game now. But, the truth is, that’s not at all the case. I still think the story throughout episodes 9-10 is really well-written, and I still think Dark Enchantress Cookie is a good villain. This is still one of my favorite games, and everything I’ve mentioned was just one tiny part of a much bigger and better game. One bad small part of the story doesn’t ruin the experience. But just because I love it doesn’t mean I’m afraid to criticize it. In fact, that’s kind of the point. Because I love this game, and I know it can do so much better. Because I’ve seen it do better. The first Dark Enchantress Cookie encounter at the end of episode 8 was a complete pain at first since I didn’t have enough EXP to level up any of my cookies, but once I figured out that I could upgrade their toppings to raise specific stats, I beat them on the very next try. And I felt a level of accomplishment and contentment that I’ve only ever experienced while playing this game. And I want this game to give me more memories like that. I’m hard on this game because I want it to improve and learn from its mistakes so it can continue to do great things like it did before. And that’s the case for anything. Just because you love something doesn’t mean you should forgive it whenever it majorly screws up, because if its faults are never pointed out, how will it improve?