Terry Plays

So I played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Lauren and I finally wrapped up our biggest game of the social distancing era, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: Complete Edition. I do not really understand why it’s considered the greatest game of all time. It’s like a mix between a Zelda game and an Elder Scrolls game, and it doesn’t get either quite right. Movement and combat always feels just slightly delayed, the choices that are allowed don’t offer for much role-playing or especially emergent storytelling, and considering how much time is spent managing inventory, there is a lot of lag simply navigating the many menus. Although it’s fun to arrange abilities and buffs in such a way to maximize your potential, It never FEELS especially good to play, at least compared to other Games of the Year.

I get why anyone would like it though – it’s freaking huge. It’s full of stuff. The sheer amount of writing and recorded audio even for the most insignificant situations is unbelievable. And the accessibility to all the quests is like nothing I’ve seen. You can find out about a quest by overhearing a conversation, pulling a notice off of a bulletin board, meeting the quest-giver in town, or just by running into the abandoned house they were going to ask you to look at anyway. It doesn’t always feel like a well-crafted game, but it is clearly the result of a lot of work. Sometimes it pays off, but honestly, it’s just too much.

We were told we could jump into this one without playing the previous entries, which now feels like a lie. Most of the main storyline lacks urgency because we never felt a deep connection to the major players, and the big threats are… pretty lame, predictable villains. Frankly, most of the major events felt BYOC (bring your own charm) because the characters left theirs in the previous games.

Thankfully, we stuck with it to get to the DLC expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood & Wine, which were, frankly, what I was hoping the rest of the game would be like. It felt a lot like we were playing through the early kitschy seasons of a TV show (say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to get to the later, wilder, genre-pushing seasons. A lot more fun, a lot more imagination, a lot more unique boss fights (though, again, it’s rough fighting a Zelda-style boss fight without Zelda-style responsive control). Also, the Witcher acts more like a professional rolling into town and resolving magically-complicated Shakespearean family power struggles and not some dumbass on a wild (goose) hunt.

The disparate feelings between the main game and the expanded content felt like a natural result of the production. This game is huge and, like most games this size, required a huge crunch to be finished. The result is a game that usually feels spread thin. The reason the DLC feels so much more lively is likely just a result of more people focusing on a smaller set of stories. Seems like a much better use of resources! As is, this game is overwhelming to the point I really can’t imagine returning to it.

Still, it’s hard not to spend so much time with something and not feel an attachment. With our last quest finished, we had Geralt strip down to his underwear, hang up his best suit of armor to display, down 20 bottles of wine (and a few onions by accident), read a goodbye note from an old vampire friend, and hit the hay in his retirement vineyard. Goodnight, Geralt.

What I get and did not get from NieR: Automata

I get the sensation of being a well-built killing machine refined from millennia worth of war data. The slashing, shooting, and dodging come from the previous NieR, but these actions are amped up in every way, bigger, faster, and most importantly, effortless. You don’t even have to hold your weapons most of the time!

I did not get the point of making the differences between each difficulty level so severe. Easy mode is basically meant to allow you to experience the story without much heartache. Normal mode is meant to be just challenging enough to make the proceedings feel dramatic without being punishing, but most difficulties can be solved by just… using a healing item when your HP get low, and failure usually comes less often from a desperate struggle than being too lazy to pull out a Medium Recovery in time. Hard mode decides to pair harder-hitting enemies with the inability to even lock on to them — TWO new challenges to get used to! The wish for a mode between Normal and Hard meant a constant feeling that there was some alternate version of the game that I’d rather play.

I get the feeling that chips and their customization were meant to be the central mechanic of the game, or should have been. They offer the clearest encouragement to pay attention to the way you play, either enticing you toward different strategies or allowing to you make your current methods even more effective through the clever combination of fusion of the right chips. They’re also a constant reminder that you are not human, driven home brilliantly by the fact that your entire chip set is customizable except for your core processor, which you need to literally function.

I don’t get why chips are sidelined by less interesting mechanics, specifically the acquisition and equipment of multiple weapons. I changed up my weapon sets at maybe two points in the game, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have had a problem with using only the first two swords the whole time. I’ll grant that different weapon choices can provide different tactical advantages — this is especially true when countering after a dodge can result in a rising slash, a spinning attack, or a forward thrust — but there isn’t enough motivation to try even half of the 38 weapons you can get. I would rather have had twice as meant chip sets as they provide, and I would have MUCH rather had the option to switch between chip sets from the quick menu instead of weapon sets!

I get the world design. The best way to illustrate a foot soldier’s part in a global conflict without actually bringing the globe into it is to give them dominion over a large contained area filled with distinct zones. The “ruined city” and its neighbors can either represent to the entire world, or just one apparently very important metropolis. This “anywhere”-ness accentuates the distant, fable-like tone of the game. The minimalism of the game’s style helps there, as well. Though tying your narrative to a mostly empty world populated by featureless automatons probably made the producers happy. *taps nose twice*

I get the side quests. In the last NieR, sidequests were an absolute nuisance that padded out the game and got in the way of the story. In Automata, the side quests, justified as operations to assist the android Resistance and gather intelligence on the machine threat, ARE the story. The simple act of being on Earth and being sentient — being alive — makes machines act strangely, and the game shows basically every possible permutation of ageless, disaffected robots looking for purpose. We see machines love each other, hate each other, try to be human, try to be BETTER than human, embrace struggle, find out what it means to live, what it means to be. Most define themselves by a single trait — the way most NPCs tend to do, right — and either embrace or are trapped by it. They so often act like any quest givers in any video game, but by merely knowing that their identities and desires originate from an entirely artificial place, your decision to take on these missions means elevating the stakes of their pantomime and recognizing their will, in turn asserting that everything is meaningless until you provide meaning to it. Magnifying this sensation is the ever-present irony that the self-serious androids, despite looking human, make far fewer attempts at acting human than most machines you meet. This is what it really means to ask the question, “What is it to be human?” This is truly science fiction.

I get the abstraction of time, kind of. It’s unclear how much time passes over the course of the game, especially when you take on sidequests that cut to a title reading TWO DAYS LATER once in a while, but it’s long enough to feel like an active and momentous number of weeks — months? — in the war against the machine threat, and long enough for 2B and 9S to form a working relationship.

That said, I don’t get the relationship between 2B and 9S. 2B is cold and 9S is outgoing, right? That comes across very effectively in the way they work together. 9S not only does most of the talking between the two of them, he also does most of the talking to NPCs on behalf of the both of them, not just because he’s naturally a talker, but because 2B either comes to expect this of him or allows him to. Their closeness is most believable in the subtle transition after a number of missions, when they go from clashing with each other to becoming comfortable in their complimentary roles.

That is, until their roles get switched up seemingly at random. They have a bad habit of mixing up their “machine’s have wills and are interesting” / “machines have no wills and must die” routine whenever they come across a new set of strange robots, with 9S being pretty inconsistent. 9S is the older model, yet he needs to be reminded that emotions are prohibited by YoRHA. And then 2B seems to forget about the emotion prohibition, and is even the first to shed tears! I get the change that’s being illustrated here, with the cold soldier getting in touch with her feelings, but there is basically no proper set-up for this moment. That is, unless you assume that she learned the value of caring for others from the sidequests you complete, which passes the work of convincing the audience that 2B and 9S have a reason for caring about each other onto the audience itself.

Actually, this is the abstraction of time coming back to bite us in the ass. Relationships presented between NPCs are suggested to have endured for centuries, but we’re supposed to believe that these taciturn androids are soul mates after… what, a month?

So I don’t really get where 9S’ enduring affection for 2B comes from, but I sort of do get that his obsession with the loss of 2B is meant to be analogous to his loss of purpose as her supporter, a member of YoRHA, and a defender of humanity when the shit hits the fan at the top of act three.

I don’t get A2. The most interesting possibility in the discovery of A2 is that there is a powerful android who lives off the grid who might be able to able to provide a new perspective into YoRHA’s real workings. Instead A2 is just like… a tough loner, and that’s it. It’s not even clear what her deal is unless you gather intelligence documents to reveal that she was an older model sent on a previous secret mission by YoRHA, which you… basically already know before you play as her.

Her ultimate purpose is to represent the desire of living for living’s sake in contrast to 9S’ madness-induced nihilism at the climax, but the path feels clumsy. Wasn’t there some other way to have this emotional moment? Why couldn’t the story be constructed so that 2B an 9S were facing each other in the end, and have their point of contention be disagreeing on what to do with the information that humanity is extinct?

I get that the game wants to shake things up once in a while by having you control different characters. It does this pretty well, most notably with the little machine getting oil for its “big brother” at the start of 9S’s story, an especially brutal moment when you trip and spill it everywhere. It really helps you understand the stark difference between the effortless flow of the androids and the ponderous gesticulating of the machines.

I don’t get 2B actually being 2E. I have no idea if that news is meant to momentous or not. If 2B’s whole thing was making sure 9S never got to the truth, what circumstances decide whether she is cold and dutiful about it or emotional and remorseful about it? Has this cycle repeated outside of the game as played? Moreover, the shallow “gotcha” of 2B’s identity switcharoo undermines 9S’ decisions to keep the truth of humanity’s extinction from 2B. Which sounds like a more interesting secret: the beliefs of every sentient thing on Earth are based on a lie, or “Actually, it was a different letter”?

I don’t get why Project YoRHA is designed to end the way it does. Considering the purpose of its formation — to boost android morale, a nebulous concept; why not just… program androids that have morale? — why violently end something that was fake, anyway? To hide its existence from who? The machine network’s purpose for fighting continuously — so it can evolve — makes more sense in comparison. But what does creating and destroying a military force actually do for humanity’s memory?

I do get the repetition of ironic circumstances of origin and the maddening implications of being created in the image of another and being forced to rely on that other. It happens first and most obviously with Adam and Eve, the game using the names of the first biblical humans to make it VERY CLEAR that one is derived from the other. But it happens again when you meet A2, the Adam to 2B’s Eve, and in a way it happens again in reverse, when 2B passes on her sword with her data to A2. And it happens again, most saliently, when 9S discovers that YoRHA’s black boxes are based on the same technology as the cores of machines. Not only does YoRHA as an organization exist because of the machines, but, literally, members of YoRHA can only exist because of the machines. This irony is the core of the absurdity of all conflict.

I don’t get the obsession with repetition and multiple endings. What if instead of being split into multiple playthroughs, the game was just… the game? And then there were just two endings: A2’s and 9S’. After all, those are the only endings that require a choice tobe made, while the ones before that happen as a matter of course.

If you are going to have multiple playthroughs, I don’t get why you would spoil the future ones. After playing as 9S, I assumed that the next playthrough would be as A2 — an easy assumption to make since you spend two playthroughs picking up Taunt chips you can’t use. I was so surprised to see that the third playthrough didn’t go back in time, but forward!

… Is what I would say if the second playthrough didn’t end with a teaser for what happens in the third playthrough. The one I was… about to play. Why would they do that?

Now, I do get one part about the second playthrough: being on the other side of 2B’s reboot after the first mission and watching yourself from the first playthrough make your configurations. The sensation that I was watching and BEING watched in that way felt like a very personal moment, and was the perfect way to get across the feeling of being connected to someone else. That felt like a door was opening onto the possibilities of seeing the same story from a different angle. There should have been more of those moments.

The only other moment that matches, and exceeds, the success of that one is, of course, ending E.

One of the great ironies of Automata is that the least humanoid characters are the ones to exhibit the greatest humanity (that is, the belief that life is worth living regardless of its purpose). That the belief that 2B, 9S, and A2 have a right to live comes from 2B’s support pod, the most primitive of all the artificial beings you ever meet — and that it’s able to awaken to this will over the course of the third act just by talking and learning to understand somebody else — is such a beautiful notion that I want to cry just thinking about it. (That said, I don’t get why the pods being the moral center of the story isn’t set up earlier; it could’ve been a great bookend).

Being in a bullet hell battle with the credits is goofy at first (I mean, Smash Bros. did this in ’98) until you get that you are literally fighting the concept of Ending. And I get the concept of your friends lending you their Friend Energy has been applied in every anime or anime-adjacent story from Dragonball to Persona. But other people who’ve played the game cheering you on from all over the world and then joining your game to die for you as the song swells in multiple languages feels like a completely unique experience in the moment.

And the notion that this game, a follow-up to a game that was already bleak, turned out to be even more bleak for most of its playtime, then flips it around to being happy and culminates in asking you to be part of something huge by giving up your save data to help someone you’ll never meet, an act that in the moment feels more like a gift than a sacrifice… I get that.

I get that finding meaning in life is recognizing and caring for the life of someone else.

I get that Automata tells clear, ringing truths by using its game mechanics to drive the story. I get that its points are muddled, hollowed, and prone to “anime logic” when using only its script to tell the story. I get that Automata’s best moments are playable. I get that its worst moments are not.

I don’t get a lot of the game’s trappings. I don’t get wanting to reach a broad audience while always conveying the sensation that you missed something by not playing the first NieR. I don’t get combining action and RPG mechanics until each ultimately diffuses the effectiveness of the other. I don’t really get the plot’s layered double-crossings and obfuscations of motivation that still manage to leave emotional moments in cutscenes feeling unclear or unearned.

Despite that, I get the feeling that Automata knows what its purpose is, which seems to be the point.

Lame shit in Persona 5 that could have been fixed

Ryuji should have been tempted by fame, and suffered for it. He is the one character most vocal about unfairness. Not injustice, but unfairness — a purer, more childlish notion that you deserve something for your troubles. He is the party member most bothered by his negative public image. He aches to be recognized for his efforts, but knows he has to keep his identity secret. This should have made him completely buy into the hype of the Phantom Thieves’ authority, thirsting for approval from the online fans, excited to give them what they want. Ryuji should have been radicalized to the point of believing that the Phantom Thieves had the vision to be the rightful judge, jury, and executioner of Japan.

Imagine in one of the scenes following Okumura’s death if Ryuji leaned back in one of the booths at Leblanc and said, “Maybe he deserved to die.” Sparks fly as the rest of the group try to counter, forcing themselves to ask what their goal in the end really is.

Of course, Ryuji wouldn’t think he’s being ridiculous — he just believes in the mission more than everyone else. It would be up to the player to decide if Ryuji’s thinking makes him a liability to the team. This could make an interesting twist when we get to the end of Shido’s dungeon, when Ryuji makes his suicide run, a decision he makes not just because he can run good or whatever, but because he’s already shown to believe that, in pursuing the Phantom Thieves’ goals, death is acceptable, even his own.

And then Ryuji should actually die. No lame pointless fake-outs. Make the player wonder if Ryuji’s radicalism was foolish (because it killed him) or noble (because it saved everyone else).

This idea of the Phantom Thieves investing too heavily into their own image is only barely explored in Mishima’s confidant story, to no great effect.

Morgana should have been the Grail’s creation, not Igor’s. Discovering that he is made by Igor reveals Morgana’s nightmares to be, really, just nightmares, and that his insecurities were actually nothing at all to worry about. This… isn’t dramatic. Instead, Morgana should have been sent by the Grail to mislead the player. However, much as the Grail was distorted by human cognition, Morgana would have been changed by the player’s, but in this case, reformed, becoming an agent for self-determination. This fits perfectly with the game’s theme of rebelling and defying expectations. This would make Morgana a character. As is, he’s reduced to an inefficient deus ex machina.

Ann should have been smarter, more autonomous, and, generally, better respected by the script. Ann has several lines expressing her dissatisfaction with her catsuit. That doesn’t even make any fucking sense. Why, in a world formed by one’s vision of their self, would she end up with an outfit she doesn’t even like? Let the woman just like being herself, for fuck’s sake.

She’s a professional model, the only member of the group to have a job, and to routinely interact with adults — the very adults so often maligned by this game! She should have maturity and insight that the other character have yet to develop. It doesn’t matter if she isn’t a top student or hacker. Ann shouldn’t be oblivious, she should be smart, and if she’s insecure about anything it makes no sense for it to be her body!

Let’s take that stupid ass scene where she’s asked to pose nude. What would be funnier? If she waved her arms and said, “You want to do WHAAAT?” or if she said, “I always told myself that if I had to pose nude… it wouldn’t be for less than a 200,00 yen.” Exclamation points shoot up over everyone else’s heads. Giving Ann conviction like this gives you so many options when she finally meets up with Yusuke. For example:

1. She shows up and immediately throw around her weight as a professional model, making increasingly more ridiculous demands for her comfort. Yusuke, obsessed with the creative process, rationalizes her demands as being for the sake of ART, expounding on his own process.
2. When asked to disrobe, she makes a big striptease out of it, coming onto Yusuke hard in attempt to turn him on so much that he has to get up and leave, giving her a chance to snoop.
3. Like 2, except it’s revealed that Yusuke is completely cold to her advances, asking that she speed things up a little. Realizing she’s in over her head, she just knocks some paint over and says, “Whoops,” forcing him to clean it up while she snoops.

There are bits like this throughout that script that could be tweaked. Don’t let stuff happen to Ann, let her do stuff.

Yusuke should have been fragile, not bombastic. Yusuke is like the Shylock of Persona characters — potentially interesting, but fucking broken by virtue of being, uh, p r o b l e m a t i c. His monkey cheese antics set him up to be a fan favorite, but it’s all blighted by his entire introductory arc — his treatment of Ann and his static inner motivation of Doing Art — which just makes him seem like a flippant asshole.

But let’s look at the facts: every facet of his life has pointed him toward a career of painting professionally, and then all at once, his key to that industry is taken away — what if he didn’t have to do that thing every adult in your life told him he had to? Yusuke could have been rendered by this terrifying possibility, the main question of his arc being, if he paints, will it be by rote, or because he chose to recommit himself?

In the script as is, Yusuke has a LOT of insight and confidence for someone whose narrow worldview was just shot to hell. Shouldn’t the artist be dealing the most seriously with their own subjectivity? I think this same question could have made him more reflective on his role within the Phantom Thieves when the shit hit the fan. Would he have the conviction to know when they were going to far? Yusuke should have had a fateful moment when everything looks bad where he says, “I just don’t know.”

A character with conviction is one thing. If a character knows exactly how to answer a hard question, consider if that character is actually just the writer in disguise.

Haru should have been the weird one. Haru’s archetype is “rich girl”. But how would you know that without being told? What about her background informs her personality? How can someone with such a huge asshole for a dad be so nice? At most, Haru should be well-mannered, but she shouldn’t actually be very good at understanding other people, because she’s never really needed anything from anyone else. Through the cracks in her manners, she should come across as tactless and unrelatable. The others should vacillate between being charmed by her, annoyed by her, and feeling pity for her. This difficulty in getting close to people should facilitate her one genuine love: gardening.

I can’t believe I have to explain this, but Akechi shouldn’t have been a super evil sneering villain, but rather, like you, someone striving to make the world better in way that doesn’t look good from the outside. Akechi is implementing a plan that has been years in the making. Despite the fatalities, getting a visionary like Shido into a leadership position must be the best, most realistic chance to improve Japan. To paraphrase the bad guy from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, Shido should seek to use corrupt shenanigans in the government to END corrupt shenanigans in the government.

Hey… Speaking of Shido and that other guy… What a lame, un-Persona-like design.

Makoto’s strategic mind should be pushed to its limit. Knowing the overwhelming odds they’re up against, and knowing how huge and complicated society is, she should have objectively appraised Akechi and Shido’s plan to reform society through political machinations as being, actually, the best way to bring about change. (This necessitates that the villains have a plan that makes sense) Ryuji and the most outspoken Phantom Thieves would push back angrily, but Makoto would remind them that their mission is to make the world better, and that maybe the mental breakdown plan is the shortest route to that. Makoto would only relent after making it clear to the Thieves that their path going forward may result in failure.

Makoto would still put all of her effort into planning Shido’s heist, considering every edge case, making sure everything will go smoothly, taking into account everything they’ve learned up until then. When Shido shuts down his palace manually, and Ryuji dies, everyone cries, sure, but Makoto, like… hides, not even available for Confidant excursions. She doesn’t respond to request for a Phantom Thieves meeting. She has to be tracked down and convinced that she’s not the reason Ryuji died.

The main characters should have had to make a real sacrifice. The Phantom Thieves never really earned their rosy ending. These are people who chose to wrangle otherworldly powers with the specific goal of changing how the world worked. The player should have been confronted directly with the question of whether or not their choices were rooted in charity or hubris. Instead, the player gets away scot-free, with all of their friends, no mark on their record. What the hell is the moral of the story?

Bad things need to happen to good people. Several times the game does somethings dramatic and then immediately reverses it. Morgana leaves the team, but not for long enough to impact any in-game choices. Ryuji vanishes, and then comes back in the next fucking scene. When people in Shibuya Square start panicking and disappearing toward the end, I thought that I was making irreversible changes in the real world, destroying shadows and killing civilians in the process… But, instead, my actions HAD no lasting effect on the world.

Drama lives in conflict. Conflict is not when the good guys beat up the bad guys. Conflict is when the good guys think the bad guys might have a point. Conflict is when the good guys are tempted to fight each other. Conflict is finding out the premise for your mission might be flawed. As is, Persona 5 is a game dripping with style but devoid of drama.

So I watched Beyond: Two Souls

I say “watched,” you may assume, to suggest that Beyond: Two Souls is more of a movie than a game. In reality, that isn’t quite true, either. Beyond: Two Souls isn’t really a game or a movie. And I don’t say this to suggest that Beyond: Two Souls is somehow bolder or more expansive than either a video game or a movie, or that it defies categorization. I refuse to put a label on Beyond: Two Souls because, if I were to do so, whatever category I were to put it into would be irrevocably worsened.

It is not a video game, nor is it a movie. If pressed to define it, I’d say it’s a twelve-hour piece of performance art where some innocent fuck is tricked into spending sixty dollars on a boring, useless item, then is compelled to use it despite a mounting sense of rage of disgust.

* * *

My relationship with David Cage, Beyond: Two Souls intrepid W R I T O R and D E R E K T O R, is a complicated one, except that it’s actually very simple, because I hate him and I think he’s a piece of crap (and a racist). I loathed Indigo Prophecy with the force of a thousand suns–enough to temporarily blind me to the surprising successes of the later Heavy Rain, which I now begrudgingly admit is an innovative and highly enjoyable piece of game-making, for all its wacky Europeanisms.

So I approached Beyond: Two Souls with a skeptical but overall neutral point-of-view. I didn’t want to deprive myself of a fun experience, but it’s hard not to feel twice-shy being once so bitten.  And there was a very specific moment in our playthrough, towards the end of the first act, that made me go cold with incredulity, and erased any charitable feelings I’d allocated for Cage.

There was a point in which Jodie, our implausibly old-name-having protagonist, has to walk through a ruined medical facility. There is an encounter with an enemy that asks you to follow the on-screen prompts to evade danger and progress. We missed several prompts somewhat clumsily, and I was actually rather surprised that we cleared the challenge, remembering how easy it was for Madison Page to meet any number of context-sensitive grisly deaths in her encounter with the good doctor in Heavy Rain.

Anyway, immediately following this sequence, Jodie got stuck in the wall trying to exit the room, frozen and inanimate (but still crying and panting–thanks). Ah. Well. Glitches happen, it’s no Fallout: New Vegas–at least not yet. So we restarted the chapter, participating in the QTE fight again, this time never missing a prompt. It was at this point that we realized is that, despite how much better we were at pressing the appropriate buttons this time, the scene played out in exactly the same manner as it had previously. Our suceesses and failures merited no rewards or consequences within the scene.

What we realized is that were never really truly participating at all. We were just along for the ride, humoring Beyond: Two Souls.

What greatly angered us was another realization. Does David Cage know that we’re humoring him, or does he really think he’s humoring us?

* * *

There is another point in B:TS where Jodie has to run away from something terrible that’s chasing her. Just to see what would happen, I put the controller down on the floor. Would Jodie be captured by this monster and torn limb from limb?

No. Some moments later, Jodie, on her own, ran away.

(Spoilers will get slightly more persistent from here forward, but only slightly. After all, you’ve seen everything that happens in this “game”–the reversals and surprises and betrayals and losses you encounter as Jodie are all rote recitations of the same Hollywood junk you’ve seen crammed into games for the last fifteen years. Even the least savvy of eight year-olds can tell you the most shocking twists to expect in such a formulaic offering. DUDES! Your idealized mentor father-figure is actually MORALLY AMBIGUOUS OMMMMMGGGGAAAAAAADD!?!?!?!?!?!)

* * *

Later, we wanted to find out if it was actually possible to get intimate with one of the other characters in the game during a romantically-charged scene. (And I don’t mean “emotionally close,” I mean “can we get THIS penis in THAT vagina?”) So I Googled “beyond two souls walkthrough”. What a redundant phrase. For the most part, Beyond: Two Souls is a walkthrough of itself.

We discovered that there was, indeed, a way that the chapter could end with sex AND a Playstation Network Trophy. We figured we’d go for it. As long as we’re going through this, we might as well get some gamer cred, or whatever.

However, there was a disclaimer in the walkthrough for this particular portion of the game:

NOTE! If in [the chapter] “Like Other Girls”, the protagonist was groped by the bar’s clientele, no closer relationship with Ryan will happen.

I know you’re probably reading this sentence because you had already finished the previous sentence, but I want you to go back and read it again.

In this story about the supposed complexity of a human being’s life and identity over the course of many years, it is suggested that because Jodie was sexually abused several years prior, she is incapable of intimacy in the present.

There aren’t many choices you can make in a chapter that actually affects the events of another chapter – just one reason the boneheaded achronological narrative is just a bloody smoking hole in the foot of the story – but Cage made sure to fit in the little moral that if you didn’t have the foresight not to avoid your attempted rape, you are damaged goods.

Not only is this thing void of good ideas, whatever ideas it manages to portray are toxic for society and antagonistic to humanity.

* * *

While experiencing B:TS I was often on Twitter, writing thoughts about it as they occurred to me. Although this form of expression is troubling in several ways, it is appropriate for the works of David Cage. Deep analysis isn’t terribly necessary. All that needs to be done is present without irony exactly what occurs in Beyond: Two Souls, and any intelligent person can construe that it is lesser than garbage.

What follows are more detailed extrapolations of my Tweets as I experienced B:TS. These are essentially a list of observations in the order they were made.

• B:TS opens with Ellen Page’s talking head, sounding confused. This is running motif in Cage’s work – big heads seeming unhappy. Supposedly, this is the end of the events of the story, and the following chapters take place BEFORE this point. This scene is mostly meaningless considering we have no idea who this is or when this takes place. It’s not like Sunset Boulevard – there are no expectations set up here.
• After every chapter, the wavy-looking “timeline” for Jodie’s life is displayed, along with the name of the next Chapter and at what point on the timeline it occurs. It would be neat if this were a screen in which you could select what chapter you wanted to experience next. It would even feel somewhat immersive if the next chapter did not proceed until you pressed X to indicate you were ready to relive this memory. Instead, the timeline is just a loading screen, loading whatever part of Jodie’s life Cage thinks you should walk through next. Though it is marginally useful in finding out at what point the next chapter occurs based on chapter you’ve already seen.
• Child Jodie is a pretty good actor. Way better than the French kids Cage got to play children from Philadelphia in Heavy Rain.
• Willem Dafoe plays Jodie’s mentor and father figure, Nathan, trying to find out how she connects to her invisible psychic/ghost friend, Aiden. He does it through all the usual bullshit ways movie paranormalologists detects psychics – by asking her to pick cards with pictures on them.
• You can control Aiden by interacting with objects marked by blue dots and knocking them over. This is Aiden’s primary purpose: knocking shit over. The game asks you to knock things over. But then at some point you knock something over and everyone in the lab starts freaking out. We start to think, “Okay, I guess we’ll stop knocking shit over.” But the story doesn’t proceed if you don’t knock more shit over. In order to convey that Aiden is sometimes “out of control” and “dangerous” the story forces us to force Aiden to knock shit over. Aiden doesn’t feel “out of control” to me. He just seems to be stuck in a story in which he is “out of control,” despite the fact he is completely in my control.
• Nathan, calming Jodie down, says, “It’s alright, Jodie, it’s over.” Jodie responds, “It will never be over.” ಠ_ಠ Yep, because real people talk this way.
• The next chapter, bafflingly, takes place at Sheikh Ahmed’s black tie gala. At this point, Jodie is in the CIA, and she’s going to use Aiden to find out what important secrets she can find in Sheikh Ahmed’s house. It’s one of the few times you have reign to float around and do stuff. Unlike other games in which you can decide how to use your powers to solve the problem in front of you, Aiden can only use certain powers on certain objects that the story needs to be interacted with to progress. Imagine a Legend of Zelda game in which the room you are in has a locked door, and there are switches all over the walls, and there is only one switch that opens it, but that switch is glowing blue, and the other switches actually don’t do anything. That is every sequence with Aiden.
• Jodie is wearing a dress with her entire back exposed. The texture of her back is somewhat terrifying – as though her skin is paper thin and you an see every muscle fiber under it. This is one of the most unsettling dips into the Uncanny Valley, but sure not the last.
• The bathroom signs for Ahmed’s place feature a veiled face over the door for the women’s bathroom, and a bearded face over the door for the men’s bathroom. This seems racist to me, but then I’ve never been to the Middle East.
• The next chapter involves a birthday party at some brat’s house. Nathan thinks it’ll be good to meet kids my age. He already picked out the present for the birthday girl: an old collection of the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Our guess is that the girl will think it’s a terrible gift and that it will act as an additional reason we should feel absolved for torturing her later. We are right.
• The party has beer and weed. We indulge in both. We also get to pick the music. We picked disco. Another brat said it was a stupid, and changed the song. We weren’t sure if that moment was to get us to hate that girl, or just B:TS trying to simply negate another one of my choices.
• You can score with some limey kid, but in the end, he and the others turn on you for being a “witch.” Their bright idea for dealing with witches? Lock them in a closet. ‘Cause that won’t backfire.
• It totally backfires. This is the only point in the story where we feel as though Jodie, Aiden, and us are on the same side. We toss knives and set fires. We’re finally having fun, despite how blurry and floaty Aiden is.
• There is a chapter that has us training to be in a special division of the CIA. It plays out like an actual montage. Pressing X to run over tires. Pressing X to solve… math equations? Flicking the analog stick to punch dudes. Do we really need this shit? I have an invisible ghost friend.
• Suddenly Aiden can “heal” wounds by just kind of floating over them. This is used again I think four more times afterward.
• Jodie’s step parents are really funny. The mother might actually be a good actor, but it’s hard to tell in this game, since nobody says things that regular people say. The father is hilarious. He just is always angry and often shouting. At some point I think you get a Trophy based on whether or not you display hatred toward him.
• For the most part, the only way for things to progress is for Aiden to knock hist over. This could easily be called Knock Shit Over Simulator Pro.
• The first wham-bam “blockbuster” sequence involves going through a ruined medical facility where people are trying to harness the awesome power of ghosts for ??????? reasons. It is at this point that all the seams show, if they haven’t already.

• All QTEs are rigged in your favor.
• Solving puzzles means switching to Aiden to knock over the “correct” thing – Aiden, really, is just a more complicated QTE.
• You can read memories from dead people’s corpses or possessions, but they only tell you what you already know.
• People respond to crises and tragedy in ways that don’t make sense. “Go!… Nothing but… DEATH… in there!”
• The logic of Aiden’s powers and the ghost world are completely inconsistent. Sometimes Aiden can help Jodie, and sometimes she’s all on her own. Aiden can beat up ghosts, but they can’t do anything to him.
• Jodie does things she should know better than doing. Like taking the elevator instead of the stairs in an emergency. What the FUCK is actually wrong with you. I don’t care if you have a magic zombie-goast pal to bail you out–take the stairs, you lazy bum.
• Jodie seems to know how to find and shut down the power for a unique piece of machinery. She doesn’t think to just cut all of the wires around her, but instead has to cross through a ghost tornado for reasons.
• Fighting the ghosts – which should be a big deal, they’re fucking flying screaming horrors that have the power to make people kill themselves and each other – is exactly as fun as knocking shit over in the rest of B:TS, in that it’s not. They could have invented a different action specifically for fighting the ghosts, but it’s the some input as knocking over paper and water bottles and crap.
• Nothing is scary or surprising, because most humans have seen a movie before, and sound cues indicate what’s going to happen all of the time.
• The engine Cage uses to make these games only heightens the excitement and drama of small things – most famously The Lizard trial in Heavy Rain. It is incapable of capturing the complexity of a fantastic action sequences the same way most video games already can pretty well.
• Jodie’s thighs are too fucking thin.
• Jodie tells Nathan, “Don’t let them do that again. If they open a passage, there’ll be nothing left.” The bad news? I think we’re supposed to be surprised that they do it again. The worse news? Because of the way the story works, it won’t be relevant for another 10 hours.
• The chapter in which Jodie is homeless and makes friends with homeless people invites a question for anyone interested in seeing more scenarios that aren’t typically presented in video games: Why isn’t the whole game about using your ghost powers to overcome and navigate the challenges of being homeless? Because 1) Cage does not have anything poignant to say about being homeless, 2) he hasn’t met enough black people in his life to write about more than one in the same story for too long, and 3) despite all the smoke he blows about taking video games to a new level, he’s afraid NOT to put in more scenes that involve the same guns and violence that every video game has.
• There’s a point where you can accept someone’s sexual proposition, but even if you do Jodie just changes her mind about it. Again, your choices are negated if David Cage doesn’t like them, yet he’s still willing to put women in dangerous and titillating situations without seriously confronting their consequences.
• There are maybe one or two times where Jodie has prophetic visions in her dreams. These were likely put in so the plot would make slightly more sense. Since the story is presented out of order, it totally doesn’t work.
• By the way. Aiden is pronounced throughout the game as “Eye-den,” except for one point when Willem Dafoe pronounces it “Ay-den.” He probably pronounced it that way because that is how you are supposed pronounce the name Aiden. Cage did not deign to correct Willem, even if it meant an inconsistency.
• Women in David Cage games exist to 1) be fucked or threatened with unwanted fucking, 2) be beaten up, 3) be impregnated, 4) cry, or 5) all of the above.
• Flashbacks to Child Jodie are mostly complete wastes of time. The only good part is when you have a snowball fight.
• Girls’ Night Out is the chapter is which Jodie is whiny, entitled, and uses her powers for stupid reasons. Rather than making you appreciate Jodie’s growth, it only highlights how often Jodie is whiny and entitled throughout the story.
• The Navajo chapter has already been equated to a bad episode of the X-Files. Doesn’t that sound great, though? What if every chapter was Jodie drifting into some town and solving their ghost problems?
• Believe it or not, the sequence in which a white girl teaches a Navajo family how to deal with the vengeful spirit that their ancestors foolishly summoned to repel the White Man 200 years ago is still not the most racist thing David Cage has written.
• The horses on the Navajo ranch are wearing English bridles, while they should be wearing Western bridles. They’re the only horses in the game, I mean, come on
• Also, nearly every time there is an elevator in this game, a sign nearby refers to it as a “Lift”. It’s like in Heavy Rain when abandoned lots were referred to as “wastelands”. Cage would never let a copy editor near his precious script.
• Nathan’s back story is illuminated very quickly and very late. Cage probably had exactly 6 hours with Willem Dafoe to just cram everything in.
• Also, I know I said Nathan was Jodie’s father figure, but is he really? Seriously. I can’t think of a single nice thing he does for Jodie, or even a single lasting lesson he imparts on her. Nathan’s assistant Cole is nicer to Jodie than basically anyone else in the story, and he’s still just a “supporting” member of the cast.
• The one environment that gets reused over and over is the dorm that Jodie stays in while working with Nathan. It’s suggested at one point we should feel sentimental about it, even though it is the least impressive looking residence in the whole game and nothing pleasant ever happens there.
• It’s during The Dinner scene where we had the brilliant revelation that the game might have been better if the chapters were divided between those in which you controlled Jodie and those in which you controlled Aiden. As is, the opportunites where you can control Aiden seem arbitrary, and when you actively control one to sabotage the other, as in this scene, it seems as though your presence at best deteriorates the story and its logic, and at worse puts you in control of the character who is in the least interesting situation at the time.
• David Cage loooooves making women take showers with their hands against the wall being all live, “Uhhh, I just looove being NAKED and wet.” It’s not sexy, though, because Jodie washes her hair while it’s still pulled back in a ponytail. Grrrrrross. No shampoo, no conditioner, just a pile of wet, dirty, smelly hair trapped in a festering pile. Help me, Aiden!
• It seems to be completely arbitrary, as well, what actions get QTE prompts. Opening a bottle of wine gets two. Putting on a diving suit doesn’t get any.
• Ellen Page is a fine actress. But she just doesn’t have the range to hold my interest or sympathy for 20 hours.
• Ellen Page is also one of the least expressive actors in Hollywood. She’s known for having a somewhat monotone voice and deadpan delivery, no matter her role. This may make her an excellent choice for some movie roles, but this makes her particularly poor one for an animated medium. Compare Ellen Page’s extremely faithful motion capture to that of Kristen Bell, from the Assassin’s Creed series, and you’ll see a markedly less wooden character model, despite the less sophisticated technology. Bell is a naturally more animated, physically/facially/vocally expressive actress, which makes her tremendously more interesting and engaging to look at when rendered as a 3D nonhuman.
• There’s a scene in which someone gets news that someone they cared about died. It’s hard to tell, though, because literally no one acts like they would have had it occurred in reality. Think about it: if someone asks you, “What’s happened?” after getting this news (first off, fuck them for not figuring it out while they’re in the room with you) would you say, “A truck… wrong side of the road… drunk driver… sentence fragments… just phrases!”
• The saddest part of the game is that there is a dedication to someone who had died. Which means, even having known the death of a friend and colleague, David Cage STILL wrote this scene. This man doesn’t know what empathy means. He can’t even empathize that Americans use elevators and not lifts!!
• And again, it’s even more jarring when, like, name actors have to work with horseshit.
• There is a chapter that is, basically, just the first act of Metal Gear Solid 4, except with a lot more floating around and wondering, “What the hell do I do now?” Yep – that’s David Cage! Pushing the envelope by making you kill brown people in a blown-out desert town! In a video game, no less!
• Jodie gets betrayed at some point. The suggestion is that we, too, should feel betrayed, but by this point she has made so many poor decisions – decision the game railroaded you and her into making – that it just feels like it’s her fault. In another game this would feel like a revelation. Here, it just doesn’t fit in with the birthday party and the homeless pregnancy and the estranged father figure and all the other stuff that happens in the story that has nothing to do with CIA missions.
• There are no fat people in this game. Cage probably hates them, too.
• In case you were wondering, yes, even while on a government mission, Jodie is still whiny and panicky and complaining.
• Your purported love interest is a terrible person who lies to you. You have the option to forgive him, when you should have the option to push him into a fast-moving river.
• As B:TS approaches its “climax,” several new characters are suddenly introduced who are conveniently “the bad guys”.
• If you put down the controller during a bout with one of these villains, you will still live and they will still die. They are so inconsequential that you don’t even need to fight them to succeed.
• Jodie is knocked out by antagonizing forces more than once after walking through a door. Considering she can see through walls, this likely means that she is an idiot.
• The only reason that the climax occurs is because several people do really stupid things that make no sense.

Every once in a while B:TS made us say, “If only this was the whole game.” If only the whole game was spent spying on enemies governments. If only the whole game was exorcising ghosts. If only the whole game was trying to get a boyfriend. If only the whole game was stealing and turning tricks on the street.

One of the hallmarks of the truly great auteur is the ability to self-edit, and show self-restraint. Tarentino edited Gogo Yubari’s vengeance-seeking twin sister Sakura out of the already incredibly genre-bending and seemingly unrestrained Kill Bill. He prioritized a cohesive, coherent narrative over simply cramming in all the stories he’d originally hoped to. And Cage seems to think of himself as an auteur, but ultimately he shows no fidelity to his own narrative–he is too eager to spill his every thought to just buckle-down, focus, and tell us a goddamned good story. Like a five year-old recounting his day at school, Beyond: Two Souls is filled with “and thens.” And then she’s a witch with magic powers. And then she’s a secret agent. And then she’s an angsty teenager. And then she’s a jilted lover. And then she’s a homeless person. And then she’s a great white savior to a bunch of hunky Injuns. And, like listening to a five year-old, I can only nod my head woodenly, praying his mother will save me from his incoherent babble before I eat my own hands out of boredom and frustration.

Instead, it’s all of these things and more. Nothing lasts long enough for it to become important. It’s none of these things and less.

tl;dr: “SHIMISANIIIIII!!!!!”

So I played Remember Me, and then I stopped.

Why is parkour still a thing in video games now? It was a key component in Assassins Creed and Mirror’s Edge, and it should have stopped there. (I’ll accept inFamous, too, because at least it’s fun then.)

But, here we are, still climbing up the sides of buildings. Like, EVERYONE can climb the sides of buildings so easily. Doesn’t that seem like a really hard thing to do? That didn’t used to be a thing. In older video games, when we came to a wall we were like, “Well, I guess we better find a way around it.” But now everyone’s trying to just climb over it.

It’s a cute idea, but you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. In the old days the question was, “If I have a grenade launcher, why can’t I explode that locked door off its hinges?” Now it’s, “If I can climb THAT wall, why can’t I climb EVERY wall??” It’s funny. As aesthetics get more realistic, the occasional inconsistencies with video game verisimilitude become more insufferable.

But then, hey, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised parkour is so present in a French game. A French sci-fi game. About memories. Called Remember Me.

The Ghost in the Shell series was a very dire and realistic meditation on the nature of technological progress and its influence on politics, the planet, and the self. It’s a crime drama first, but the themes of memories and identity run throughout all of the proceedings.

Meanwhile, Remember Me opens like, “You lost your memories! Because a company called Memorize decided they could do whatever they wanted with your memories! Now take ’em down, so we can all have our memories back! Even if you have to mess with other people’s memories! And remember to remember to memorize memories!”

Now, isn’t it kind of obvious that the big twist is gonna come when you get your memories back? I know it’s a sci-fi, but it feels really silly and regressive to just make your plot actually involve what your game is thematically addressing.

Maybe I’m getting stuck on this, but… You’re supposed to use the plot to convey the point, the same way you use a frying pan to cook a steak. You can’t take the meaning of the game and then build the plot on that. You can’t cook a steak with another steak.

To be fair, there is other stuff going on in the game: the haves vs. the have-nots. The rich can afford to relive their own happy memories, while the impoverished can only scrape together the memories of others and go nuts in the process. There’s even a character early on whose decision to do something drastic is based on a very expensive hospital bill she has to pay. It actually feels just barely relevant at times.

But it’s not just plot and aesthetics you use to convey meaning: it’s mechanics. The script seems to be telling us that the game is about the malleability of the human psyche, and that my character is a genius hacker. If that’s so, how come I spend less time rewriting people’s memories – which is, in fact, a very neat and juicy bit of the game – and more time punching junkies and climbing up and down the sides of walls?

The thing is, Remember Me isn’t the first game that’s about running toward a glowing waypoint or climbing and punching things like a drunk amnesiac baboon. But it’s the last one I deign to play.