Oh Phil. Another one of these! Seriously? I love how he finds the most obvious things in games and writings and considers them discoveries of a lifetime worthy of articles! I'm all for diving deep into video game themes and treating them seriously but come on man. The whole "nobody listens to the hero so he/she has to go outside of the norms to do what is right" is like the oldest trope in fiction storytelling about a hero's journey! Mass Effect follows that same trope. It's as simple as that.
@Dave1927p: Totally agree. It is why I think games should have an easy mode or perhaps they can call it. "too busy to enjoy all the nuances of the story through difficulty and too busy to play a game over and over again to git gud but would still like to enjoy the story and see how it unfolds!" mode.
Not a "press A to proceed" mode but a mode which is a bit forgiving without sacrificing the game's initial vision.
I agree. I am just bad at these games so I keep dying in the first biome but I think I am getting better each run. But my problem is that luck plays a huge role in defeating bosses too but I guess that is part of the game's genre.
I should say I am glad Gamespot is considering game design choices to criticize a game. Sometimes, they don't even care about how the game is designed and quickly wish it was designed another way. I remember a certain article about a certain game from this writer being very angry about design choices and not giving them some more thought before attacking them and labeling them as terrible. So I am glad he is opening his mind a bit.
@mogan: Rise of Skywalker promised an ending to an ongoing saga involving multiple human characters and it did not deliver it for many people. This movie promises an epic fight between two giants and from other reviews, it seemed to have delivered it. Godzilla: King of the Monsters on the other hand did not have many compelling fights and they were all under a heavy layer of rain or fog so they were not clear and it is why that movie did not get great reviews. Know the differences between movies.
Picking on a movie which has a poster of a giant ape fighting a giant lizard, over its human characters means you are not interested in engaging with the movie in its own language. The movie has promised a fight between these two monsters and nothing else. Nobody would see the poster, the trailer and then go to the movie expecting to get some deep characterization. More prominent critics have given this movie a good score or a must watch because of the spectacle. So, this review is not smart as its writer clearly thinks it is. It is just an annoying piece of writing.
@Xylymphydyte: But how do I press buttons? Why can't they show someone pressing buttons. MS has been so good at showing that and I feel like Sony is dropping the ball.
Honestly, this is an article? This is a facebook post on the Giantbomb fan group.
Phil writes the most bizarre articles. Before he wrote about TLOU2 and how its story using standard ways of telling a story is bad and how he was the genius who figured it out and now this one. Is Gamespot short on material? What is going on over there?
I don't think I agree with almost anything that is argued in this article. I think many people are judging the characters' decisions from a position of privilege and from their own feelings of Ellie and Joel. I don't think you can always expect a person to do a right decision after a traumatic event. Many people destroy their own lives trying to make sense of a pain that has happened to them. Does it mean they are bad? Not really, it just means they are human. So, I don't think the game is going out of its way showing Ellie as a villain. There are no villains in this game. The game is showing her to be human. It is also refreshing to see a post apocalyptic story without characters learning the value of life after a terrible experience. Sometimes, you are broken after a traumatic event and you cannot put yourself back together and to me, this is what is going on with characters in this game. So, while I don't agree with their decisions, I do understand them.
The game is challenging us to look at heroes and villains differently. One of the weak points of the game was that every group that you fight is very evil. Whether it is the hunters, or cannibals, or even fireflies. They are hostile towards you and without much context on their own lives, most gamers think of them as evil villains worthy to be put down. But the second part shows you are not only killing digital people, you killing those with stories like those belonging to Ellie and Abby.
As for the game tricking you to feel something about someone, it is called story telling and we do it in books, movies, tv shows, even music. Art is to manipulate you, for good or bad. It is to entice you, to elicit an emotional response out of you. Paintings are disoriented in different styles to get you to feel a certain emotion. Music kicks in at a certain point in the movie to get make you feel sad or happy. Books hide the truth from you so you can see the world from the POV of the main character. In other words, artists lie to the audience to get them to feel and empathize with the subject of the art. It has been done for as long as the art of story-telling has existed. So, instead of playing detective to the most obvious mystery, you can argue how effective this was for you. The article says I was supposed to feel something at this scene but I didn't. It is almost as if he wants to rub it on the developers faces that see, I did not feel anything, you suck!! This has been the most pervasive argument I have seen of this game. We want to prove our intelligence by shown how a big game cannot make us feel anything and we consider that an achievement. Well, you don't have to be a robot and it is okay to be manipulated. It does not make you any less of a critic, even though you aren't one to begin with!! In movie criticism, Roger Ebert, Todd Maccarthy, Mark Kermode all write how they felt while also acknowledging having seen the director's hand as the puppet master. Because if you get affected, it doesn't mean you are weak or brainwashed. It just means you are human.
I get what the writer is trying to say and the story in MW2 suffers from the fact that action games should not spend much time in story-telling and should get the players to the action as fast as possible. But still, this game is much more subversive than any other COD game. Just that the main bad guy is an America general makes this game way more different than other COD games.
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