I’ve been rethinking about Red Dead Redemption II for a while and I kind of feel sorry for saying the game is bad. But hey, I’m sure Rockstar will keep on doing fine anyway.
And yet… Red Dead Redemption sure isn’t the Citizen Kane of video games, it’s the Heaven’s Gate of video games. It’s a game that has some very pretty things to show you and some insane attention to detail, but that is mired in its own bloated overindulgence and lack of focus (As an aside, you can probably fit the entire original theatrical release of Heaven’s Gate in the prologue chapter. How’s that for bloat?).
Someone above talked about chapter 6 and, I have to say I concur; the end of Arthur’s arc in chapter 6 is spectacular. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hero cope with his own mortality and fear and regrets quite like this. The cause of his disease is also very clever: “All them bullets shot at me, all them horses threw me, all them fights and it was the beating of that pathetic little fella Downes that killed me, I reckon”.
Of course, you’re not supposed to think about the video game logic of it: the disease seems to have no drawback whatsoever on his superhuman prowess and Arthur “finds redemption” by killing an extra 150 lawmen/soldiers to help his accomplices get away. shrug
And then… the 20-hour two-part epilogue sucks most of the goodwill built by chapter 6. “You know how the epilogue for RDR was a return to normal life? Let’s do this again, but now it’s ten times as long! What the players want… is to know how John learned to put up a picket fence. Or how he got a bank loan! We’re geniuses!”
The final cutscene of the epilogue is particularly painful and ham-fisted. Before it is one of the worst shitty anticlimax boss fight I’ve ever played (protip: the trick is to do absolutely nothing). Dutch seems to be spending the entire scene thinking: wait, what’s my character’s motivation here? Why am I killing my ally for someone whom I think betrayed me twice and leaving him all the money I’ve spent years obsessing over? Am I having an epiphany here? Why am I again in a standoff with Micah, but now without the emotional relevance of when it happened in chapter 6? Shit, I don’t know! Roll credits !
I still have no idea why the game doesn’t bother showing out the glory days the game spends hours telling you about. Are they keeping it for the pre-pre-quel, Red Dead Redemption III – Hosea and the Civil War? I assume they are, because an entire part of the story’s arc is missing, the part where Dutch was apparently a good leader.
There’s about two hours of dialogue in chapter 6 that are brilliant. It’s a shame about the other 98 hours though… it’s like the writers could only sustain that level of writing for a little while. Those two hours don’t really redeem all the rest either. Rockstar has turned into a JRPG company.
But maybe it’s not really about the story. I tried doing at bit of that “smelling the roses” everyone is talking about. So I found a priest making a sermon near someone’s grave. Interesting! I used the greet response, my character said something inappropriate and the priest just left. Then I tried to get closer to the grave and the NPCs ran to call the cops. WTF?
I sure doesn’t help that the game has some of the most atrocious control scheme, UI and menus I’ve seen in a AAA game and the gameplay has been focus-tested into irrelevance.
Instead of Heaven’s Gate’s exploding horses and endless takes, Red Dead Redemption II has years of crunch culture. It makes me wonder what the reception for the game would have been if the media’s coverage of the game had been less lavish.
The truth is I feel sorry for all the time I’ve spent with the game. I feel sorry for the completionists who do all the stupid playstyle challenges and hunt pelts for all the camp and pouch upgrades… only to discover the camp is gone for good after chapter 6 and all the pouch upgrades are essentially free in post-game. Seriously, what a lack of respect for the player’s time.
I also feel sorry for the poor programmers that made shrinking horse balls, mechanics that have no real use, tutorial prompts no one will ever heed because they have no relevance to anything whatsoever, the entire Guarma segment and making an entire fifth of the map a post-game bonus that’s mostly empty.
Some completionist said that you have better chance of finding a woodpecker in real life than in the game. Food for thought… Honestly, Red Dead Redemption II made me want to cut back on playing video games. What kind of real wilderness could I have seen with those 100 hours?
Then again, what a time to have the revelation that I should go outside the house and play, huh?
