I played and enjoyed the first season of The Walking Dead, so I had pretty good expectations for season 2. But by around halfway through the second episode, I grew tired of this game and realized how dumb it all really is.
My main issue with the series is all the forced drama and the mind-numbingly repetitive plot:
1. Character A does something utterly stupid, puts others in danger.
2. A difficult moral situation occurs requiring a big decision by character B.
3. No matter what decision is made, a character C is pissed off, gets mad at character B and accuses them of something terrible. TENSION in the group! A soap opera-style dramatic dialogue of nonsense and clichés ensues.
4. Your task is then to calm that character C down. It seems like you're doing something, but in reality, whatever you say, it doesn't matter. You, and characters A, B, C reflect on the morality of the situation. You all start wondering: did we do the right thing? Oh, the drama.
5. Person C slowly comes to realize that person B had no choice, and that it was a difficult situation, and that anyone in that position would've done the same thing, blablabla. Character C calms down and forgives character B, and all is well again, temporarily, that is until:
6. Repeat 1 through 6 ad nauseam till the game is over.
This is really just a soap opera with a dumb zombie-apocalypse setting. And it's so poorly written, that most of the time none of the drama makes any sense. There's no reason for a character to react or behave the way they do.
And Clementine, the little girl, makes no sense as the protagonist. First of all, she's boring and has no personality. At some point halfway through, I was so sick of the plot and silliness of it all that I stopped picking any of the dialogue options, not because it's difficult, but because I just did not care about the whole fake drama in this series. I wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. And did my silence affect anything? Of course not. The story moved on as normal. The people I was supposed to convince ended up convincing themselves without me saying a word. My other big problem with Clementine is that she talks and acts like a 10-year-old kid, and looks like she's 8 years old, but everybody treats her and talks to her as if she were an adult. And others often ask her to do some of the most dangerous tasks. In the dialogue options, you can choose to refuse doing these jobs, but it doesn't matter because you'll be "convinced" to do them anyway. She also seems to have unreasonable strength for a someone of her stature, to the point of absurdity: such as kicking down a door down that a huge number of "walkers" couldn't pass through. REALLY?
Lee was a much more sensical protagonist in Season 1. That, and with the fact that it was fresh back then, made me like Season 1 a lot more.
But there is one thing that this season did very well. And this thing is the only reason I'm giving Season 2 a 6/10, and not a 4/10. The second half of the episode, all the way up to the ending, was well done. Why? Simply because, finally, what you were doing actually started mattering. You made some story-altering decisions that led to different endings. That was certainly lacking in Season 1, but we finally got a tiny dose of it at the very end of Season 2. Aside from that, this series is pure overly dramatic, overrated garbage.
I'm sure there is a demographic out there, possibly made up of women in their 20s, who really like this game. If that's their target audience, fine. But I won't be buying Season 3, unless some BIG interesting shakeup happens, or maybe if it goes on sale for less than $3. I'm done with this.