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Why Everyone Hates It: On the surface, Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN is a garish ugly mess of an immature browser game based on Naruto, loaded with annoying ads, serving only to advertise the anime fan site hosting it. It's hard to find something less appealing.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: Aesthetically, it is a bit of mess of primary colored tables, and the logic and humor are generally based in sugar-high-style cheap shots at various anime series and their fan bases.
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Why I Like It Anyway: Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN is, despite appearances, a shockingly well designed game. On the surface, it appears to be a rather pathetic Legend of the Red Dragon-derived browser-based grindfest. Something like if Kingdom of Loathing lacked its charming stick figure art, class selection, and variety of areas. Sticking with it however leads one to discover impressive layers of depth, nuance, and creativity, with an ever increasing list of sidequests and sub-games steadily being stuck together like some sort of browser-RPG-katamari.
The core game of raising stats and levels, completing quests to earn new ranks, open new areas, and eventually loop one's character around to play through again, shows a surprising degree of influence from the Paper Mario games. On the surface, it seems rather mindlessly simple. As you progress, variously ranked assortments of random missions become available, each requiring a check made with one or more stats. For each point in a stat you have, a single 10-sided die is rolled. Each die that matches or beats the listed difficulty of the mission is counted as a success, similar to the mechanics of pen and paper RPGs like Shadowrun, Deadlands, and World of Darkness. A certain number of successes is required to complete the mission, earning experience in the associated stat, some cash, and possibly other rewards like items or new character joining as allies. Failing still yields a partial experience reward, and eventually the option becomes available to focus on missions based on a particular stat. The higher a given stat rises, the more dice are rolled, both increasing and evening out the odds of completing missions.
Eventually however, missions begin to require some serious strategy. In some cases, the number of required successes will skyrocket, requiring more successes than the initial stat caps even allow for, or with difficulties far above the highest die roll actually possible. Bonuses can, and in these cases must, be applied to the various stats' raw level (dice rolled), range, power (bonus to each die's result, never exceeding the range), and free success count. Various items can permanently grant bonuses to all of these, and are given out rather freely for completing various sidequests and sub-games. Early on however, one must rely on allies. Roughly 100 characters can be recruited as allies, either as bonuses for completing certain missions, quests, and random mini-games. Each ally once obtained has a list of special skills they are willing to teach, which can be purchased with a pool of skill points which are accrued along with experience, and then used in conjunction with mission attempts. Up to three of these allies at a time (eventually) can also be brought along in the player's party, each one providing a unique passive bonus, periodically drop useful items after missions, and certain combinations of allies form official teams, which grant further passive bonuses. On top of this, many allies can level up to more powerful forms under particular circumstances, adding more skills to teach, better bonuses, and sometimes allowing for different team formations. While a fair deal of experimentation is often required, seemingly impossible challenges can generally be overcome quite easily by finding the right combinations of allies and skills, if one is willing to work out all their available options.
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This brings up another point of savvy design. BvS has a surprisingly high amount of transparency, and controls against randomness. Stat check results are always written out in a breakdown box (below the button to move on to the next mission), allowing one to feel out the mechanics and see just how close they came. While the specifics are never mentioned, notices are displayed when a mission can be automatically passed with the use of a particular skill, or if completing it with a particular ally in-party will cause them to level up. The requirements to start new quests are typically listed well in advance of when they're actually met. Most satisfying of all, any time a mission has a random chance of a special reward, be it an item, ally, or miscellaneous bonus, the odds of receiving it increase for every time the mission is completed without it being granted, and a message to that effect is displayed. Not only is the player made aware that they have missed something, with persistence they are assured it will eventually be rewarded, regardless of how poor their luck is (assuming of course the random number generator deigns to bring the mission up again and they can consistently complete it, of course).
This same design sensibility turns up in the season mechanic. Like most browser games of this nature, eventually a quest becomes available to "loop" their character, resetting their stats, and progress down most quest lines, while keeping various permanent bonuses. Here, shockingly little is lost in looping, and the quest to do so requires very little beyond grinding stats up towards their maximum after having done so once or twice before. Additionally, looping adds one to the player's "season" which unlocks a number of new features. Particularly on reaching seasons 2 and 3, new features are added to the game across the board. New allies, new levels attainable by old allies, new quests, new sidequests, modified versions of old quests, and new mechanics, like the ability to acquire and set an opening, battle, and ending theme (as in, the music which plays in the hypothetical TV series based on your character), providing various innate bonuses, a difficulty adjustment mechanic, allowing the range, success requirements, and EXP rewards to be cranked up higher and higher at higher seasons, and a "mega mission" toggle, which makes all missions take ten times as many daily action points to attempt, but pay out eleven times their usual reward. While very little of the game really benefits from seriously grinding for a higher season count (the main benefit being higher stat caps), tools are made available for those so inclined to reduce hundreds of clicks to a streamlined handful.
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All of that however is just the core game, which ultimately forms only a small part of the strange tangle of game mechanics that is BvS. On top of the basic gameplay, each player can and should join a player-run village. As the various players contribute funds, resources, and pure population, the leader gains access to an increasing variety of upgrades, providing various bonuses to all members, access to friendly opt-in village vs. village combat, with a surprising amount of nuance, with individual players able to challenge each other to duels, taking them out of the equation for actual attacks, setting up and flushing out spies, and so forth. Particularly impressive however is that while players can make an active effort to help their village, and will generally be rewarded for doing so, antisocial types get to help too, as various mechanics reward villages for players simply playing the game, and entice players to participate in more critical village activities with impressive personal rewards.
Then there's the main gimmick. As players progress through the game, and villages purchase upgrades, and the calendar rolls around to different dates, various in-game menus are expanded, with the addition of what are in many cases entirely new games with varying amounts of interconnectivity. At the simplest, major sidequests are eventually added in to the main mission listing, largely banning the use of standard skills and allies, involving interesting mechanical gimmicks, in one case unlocking a secret fourth stat, and eventually yielding impressive rewards to carry into other parts of the game. Another fairly mundane system has giant monsters attacking villages (either by random chance or summoned forth with village resources). Everyone in the village is encouraged to blow huge amounts of action points trying to defeat these, for greater odds of receiving the items they drop. Each of these monsters it should also be noted is an avatar of a player, created with their input, as a result of a very late game quest where a leader completely destroys their original village as they ascend to a higher level of existence, making for an interesting glimpse of late game content.
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Then there's the truly disconnected sub-games, usually accessed with main game resources, and benefitting from certain quest rewards, but otherwise completely independent entities. Village leaders for instance can activate a truly multiplayer zombie survival game, where all willing villagers work together to march across a map, searching for equipment, purchasing skill ranks, eventually trying to reach and destroy Gauntlet-style zombie generators, using completely independent pools of action points and experience than the rest of the game. Daily giant robot fights require various parts to be acquired and customized, again self-contained beyond initial entry fees, and eventual prizes. Late game side quests include a surprisingly detailed and puzzle-oriented cyberspace setting with incredibly difficult boss fights, with combat stats and a player damaging system not used anywhere else, and a pizza delivery car driving game with major CCG elements. Then of course every weekend, one has a chance of attending "BillyCon," a bizarre self-contained sim game, where time and resources must be distributed to attend various panels and events, raising dozens of con-going skills, purchasing cosplay elements, and competing in mini-games, while keeping an eye on levels of sleep stench and hunger. Heading off to drop off piles of swag may also be needed, depending on whether the player opts to pay for a room at the hotel, or has is opting to commute back and forth from home. Then of course there's the implementation of full Japanese style mahjong, complete with seat winds, dora, and yaku... and of course, equipment to increase your experience rate, letting you unlock higher difficulties and boss battles against opponents with extra draws and concealed discards sooner.
This sort of thing is the reason the main game remains so stark quite frankly. Rather than simply refine the core game, the lead developer is constantly designing completely new games whole cloth, and integrating them loosely with what's already there via interconnected costs and rewards. While extremely unorthodox, the resulting franken-game really holds one's interest. If the core game gets dull, you can take a break from it, committing those action points to PvP activities, or dumping them into cyberspace exploration. When you loop around to a new season, you generally maintain your progress on the various sub-games you're working on. If you don't have time to spend your daily allotment of actions on one or more aspects of the game, a few quick clicks allow you to shunt everything to one quickly spendable place, putting all those daily freebies to good use in only a minute or two.
As a free, sophisticated browser game, you really may as well go sign up and try it for a few days. There's a lot of fun to be had once you get past the mild embarrassment of trying to determine if, say, Emosuke and Trapchan give a bonus when used together with Stalkergirl. For what it's worth, no, they don't.
