Halibut Harpoon: A failure of a dev rod, Joke or otherwise
Hi, been a minute since I’ve posted here, but I guess I’ll get to the point. Halibut doesn’t work as a dev rod on a large amount of levels, and I wanted to talk about it as a semi essay post, as well as comparing it to other rods.
Let’s start with the concept: A super grindy joke rod that’s op for grinding money and hunt fish- and we’ve immediately run into a problem. A joke rod, conceptually, is fine. An op rod conceptually is fine. And a grindy rod is fine. But all 3 together is not.
How about we talk about how it fails as a joke rod: see, a joke rod that worked was Dave rod, because it was incredibly hard to get and extremely not worth getting. It can only fish rocks and requires a boulder to get, so no one will actually go for it unless they have literally nothing better to do. Halibut is actually good, but that becomes a problem when you’re expected to do a Dave’s rod worth of grinding, which isn’t something any rod should require. Also, another note, Dave rod wasn’t released after The Deep, it was released after TideFall, which was a far more enjoyable update.
Now, how does it fail as an op rod? Migu Rod is one of the best money rods in the game, even now, as well as being incredibly useful for duping fish. And compared to Halibut, it was far less grindy, despite still being so. It also had a very unique minigame, which made it feel even more worth getting. Halibut is good, but has no flair to it. It steals Noiseform’s laser passive and makes it more boring. And what utility does it even bring? Hunt fish catching? Literally every rod has that nowadays, it isn’t special in any way. And, again, Migu rod wasn’t released after The Deep update, it was in the middle of Everturn Forest’s update.
Finally, it’s failure as a grindy rod, which is the hardest to compare since only a few rods have ever been this grindy, so I’ll compare it to Lullaby. Now, when Lullaby came out, people did complain that it was too grindy and not worth it, but I lowkey think the hate was far less justified than Halibut cus all they did to make the rod better was make the metronome give progress (at least that’s the only thing people really noticed). But as a grindy rod, Lullaby works because it’s not a joke. It’s a riddle, that once you understand, the grind is 1000 times easier. It has a gimmick that, once dealt with, makes the quests easier. Halibut is JUST grindy. The gimmick is that it’s a joke and annoying. That’s literally it. Also, Lullaby was released with other dev rods, not by itself.
In conclusion: Halibut Harpoon doesn’t conceptually work and fails at what it tries to be, because what it tries to be is 3 different things in a trench coat, except the trench coat is on fire, and is having its atoms split