Bully's unique story, setting, and combat breathe new life into the Rockstar gameplay dynamic.
In Bully, you play as Jimmy Hopkins, a young miscreant who’s been expelled from just about every school you can name. His mother and stepfather aren’t necessarily concerned by Billy’s behavior; they just want him off their hands. So they dump the kid into Bullworth Academy, a prep school with a dubious reputation. As soon as he arrives he finds the school to be a terrible place, ruled by clicks and corrupt teachers and prefects, and soon becomes involved with a kid named Gary, and an uphill struggle to remove the rampant bullying and violence from Bullworth. Now that’s original. Not only is it original, it’s a remarkably different setting from the previous molds of the Rockstar gameplay, running the gamut to the violent social satire that is Grand Theft Auto to the depressing washed out wasteland of Manhunt. It’s a school, so school and decency rules apply, so there isn’t any killing hookers, stealing cars, or sticking a crowbar into someone’s head. Aside from that, it works like you would expect. You travel across school grounds and the towns around it, playing the assorted cliques against each other to, in the end, control them all. There is a lot to do in Bully. Right from the start you’re acquiring respect, avoiding the prefects to enjoy your time in this place, but you’ll soon find yourself with a skateboard, a sling shot, stink bombs, and other assorted items to help you. There are stealth missions, errands, classes, odd jobs for money, lockers to break into, tagging missions, and other challenges to put this stuff to use. One thing you’ll be depending on, however, is your skill at scrapping. You’ll be forced to throw down with a lot of people in this game, and it’s a very good thing that combat is easy to pick up and loads of fun. You can bully enemies who are almost out of health, and you can also stick them into trash cans and other hilarious things. That being said, if you stick with your original set of combat skill, you’ll get nowhere. You can learn new techniques in Gym Class (wrestling with Fatty ought to have you rolling with laughter), and you can learn top-secret military techniques, like uppercuts, from the enigmatic side-splitting wino who lives on school grounds, provided you can supply him a transistor for his oft-breaking radio. You can enter the dating game, and as a teenager with raging hormones, why wouldn’t you? You’ll date several girls throughout the twists and turns of Bully’s hilarious, tongue-in-cheek story, but you can make out with any girl, and several guys, at any time. If you do intend to pursue a relationship, just make sure your significant others do not come in contact. Trust me. I will say it is kind of funny watching the red-head Christy and the dorky Beatrice with the ever-present cold sores going at it. Does that make me a bad person? At the end of the day Bully presents you with enough free-roaming gameplay and customization to keep you from getting bored, and juggles enough separate genres with such inborn skill to keep you profoundly satisfied. The graphics in the game are sharp and detailed, and the character models are as great as they’ve ever been. Jimmy may look like a dumb brute, but he’s quite intelligent. The teachers look very appropriate (I like Edna the “Cook” the best, but the alcoholic English Teacher comes in second). The environments all look unique and real, and the game does something else I like quite a bit. In Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, and most games from most developers, there are millions of nameless character models that all look the same. Bully had the idea to use all these models once, and create a very large cast of supporting characters for the game. That way there’s only one Christy, Fatty, or Darby model that appears throughout the game and it’s always Christy, Fatty, or Darby. That works very well since we are in on school grounds, and should become familiar with the faces around us, especially when there aren’t too many of them, as in Bully. The angles may be a little sharp, and there may be a few programming errors Rockstar has become infamous for, but they don’t affect gameplay as they do in Vice City, so it really isn’t a big deal.
The sound is arguably the portion of the game. The music is expertly composed. Throughout the 20+ hours of gameplay not once did I get tired of any song in the entire game. Its wicked brilliance sounds like some of the best compositions of Danny Elfman, and not in a Danny Elfman rip-off way either. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had done the score himself. The sound effects all sound great, and nothing ever sounded out of place. The voice acting is also superb. Jimmy Hopkins is the anchor of the game, and the voice acting has to be better than that of, say, Tidus of Final Fantasy X. And it is. Not just for Jimmy, but for everyone. Bully is easily in the top five games of voice acting this generation, up there with Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and Killer7. This game is hard to get tired of. Like any Rockstar game there is so much to do it’s almost sickening. But a good kind of sick. After the story you can still get your fill of Rubber Bands (Hidden Packages), Class, and general delinquency. I haven’t played the game in awhile, but only because I’ve moved on to other games. I could certainly see myself coming back to this one soon.
Bully is yet another crowning achievement for Rockstar, a company that arrived in force with Grand Theft Auto III and hasn’t let me down since.