I gotta admit I had originally typed GTA V where I posted āRockstarā
Maybe Bullyās OK, Jack Thompson freaked out because you can kiss boys, right?
I had a ton of fun with L.A. Noire for the wrong reasons
I think Johnnyās really interestingly played. Heās confronting the failure of his ideology and life and the violent actions he took that ended in failure; heās a revolutionary in exile with a second chance at power and as long as they maintain the narrative threat he poses to your character thereās good tension between his goals and yours. Given his hardline ideology and selfish personality, any accommodation he makes with the player character can be called into question- is he sincere, manipulative, or influenced by living inside yourself and your niche? And the same works in reverse. How can you submit to him knowing heās a failure?
The Arasaka side of the narrative and a lot of the worldbuilding imported directly from the late '80s scene is a disaster; they made a point of holding things in stasis but Arasaka is so self-concerned that it canāt speak to the world- and player-story effectively. They can only generate plot reasons for the characters to interact with the main thread.
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You still canāt buy this digitally on the playstation store.
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The problem Iām trying to highlight is that they couldnāt convey the evolution of that relationship over the course of the game. In one mission, youāre good buddies getting along fine, and in the next heās shouting some megalomaniacal shit. The ending where you give him your body is especially incoherent, since he just puts on a polo, buys an expensive guitar for a poor kid who is definitely going to get robbed as soon as the schmaltz is passed, and ride a bus out of town. It doesnāt follow from any previous characterization. And, of course, how could it?
Any characterization Johnny got throughout the game was contingent on which mission you happened to be on or which minor vignette you stumbled on. It feels like there was no sense of control over the tone they wanted to convey with him, so it falls back on well worn cliches that CDPR has already driven into the ground with the Witcher trilogy (the jaded cynical merc who only wants to get his dick sucked is the most CDPR possible character).
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Ok, yeah, the narrative structure is a mess and this is just one of the ways. Witcher 3 is phenomenally tightly written for a game of its size and I largely attribute it to how clear an archetype Geralt is; as long as heās consistent they can do quest-of-the-week material of varying tone and the main character relationships can be handled by the writers that own them.
Johnny is complicated enough and his relationship with the player can have enough different states that heās not suitable for a lot of the places they use him. They do best when he comments on the world or the lack of change or fills the player in; worst when he tries to encourage a result or suggest it follows a cadence.
The amount of damage they caused themselves in mishandling phone conversations as quest starters alone is staggering.
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CP2077 falls into a problem that CDPR should have been able to avoid: that character relationships feel flimsy when they only exist during character-specific story missions. The characters seem to disappear from the world whenever youāre not doing a quest for them. This is especially bad with the fixers, who have fairly well drawn personalities that donāt add up to anything because thereās no sense of actually interacting with them. Theyāre just car-location/gig/reward vendors with faces.
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It isā¦ perhaps troubling that the two endings which feel most emotionally satisfying involve telling the game to go fuck itself and leaving night city for good (whether through the nomads or suicide) and the least affecting or interesting endings focus on all the elements the game spends the most time on (Arasaka and Johnny)
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conceptually, johnny is one of the most obviously thoughtful aspects of the way theyāve revived this property but kept so much of it thematically frozen in amber, and itās ironic that because his role in the plot is like, an MGS2-grade early game spoiler, they had to elide that in the prerelease media, and since his actual performance can be awfully one-note, I was already primed to see him as heavy-handed as the rest of it.
Itās a similar story (āworld is a fuckā genre, letās say, and post-history future) but the ending Disco Elysium pulled was one of its most breathtaking feats. I donāt put a lot of stock in game endings because theyāre so contrary to the strengths of the type of storytelling games are good at so I tend to have very low expectations.
One of the greatest feats Final Fantasy has ever been capable of is making endings suitable to the emotions RPG exponential power growth creates; prog rock is a heaven-sent partner to 9999 damage and Ultima
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Disco Elysium ending was a masterstroke at least in part because theā¦ climax of the game came about a good deal before you get to that ending so they can get away with tying up loose ends and telling the player about the choices they made without it feeling deflating.
But really, a very good job of telling the player that they made decisions that the game remembered.
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I bailed on FFX around its release but recently watched someone play up to Yunalesca and I was shocked at how well the point of no return shift landed (rejecting the pilgrimage, this is my story but also her story, etc.)
Yāall have me back around to playing 2077 tho so gj, Iāve always wanted to checks notes fade away
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Hmmmmmmmmm.
Hanging out with FFX sounds kind of good right now.
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the english dub and the pacing for the middle 50% of the game or so are atrocious but if youāre never played it in japanese and conveniently also have a lobotomy scheduled I donāt see why not
alternate dub if you canāt stand the english
yes I have downloaded all 22.37GB of this file
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The spread of voice direction quality in 2001 alone is incredible
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I can only imagine how the LucasArts people who had been doing this a decade earlier felt
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I mean I do have a whole thread about how much I hate it.
But now I have a kid and two free hours a night.
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Good parenting lessons to glean
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Itās kinda great how RPGs make the most sense for two almost opposite times in life: the teenage years when you have no concept of how much time you have left on earth, and the parent times when you have limited free time and energy.
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rpgs are good for any time. most can only play an rpg for a few hours. i can play thirty minutes of an rpg