Been replaying Alan Wake 2 a bit, having charged through it at launch too quickly, and forever there is a Remedy game thought percolating in my head, and today it’s that Remedy characters talk explicitly about their feelings, which, while the post title is a joke, does give Max a level of self-examination most dudes have never hit. Often a Remedy inner monologue statement begins “I felt”:
“I felt like I was walking into a trap. I felt guilty, like I was about to get caught.”
I can count on my fingers the games I don’t think this is missing from.
The Maxes Payne and Alans Wake do it, the good Prince of Persia does it (the first thing we find out about the prince in Sands of Time is that he hates killing people, but it took killing someone to find that out). I feel that most big-budget games don’t have any coherent internal life to their characters. And it’s not like I want every character to have voiceover examining their own mood, but usually it’s like the author never even did this as an exercise. What’s Joel feeling right now in The Last Of Us? Um, um, um,,,
Remedy characters have always been pretty coherent and interesting, going back to Max Payne 1, whose writing has often had its point missed in much the same way Alan Wake’s gone unrecognised for being not badly written but substantially about bad writing. Both are thoughtful homages to things most of their audience took little interest in.
In the pic at the top of this post, Max discovers the thing he’s been on a revenge quest about is way worse than he thought, but his reaction, pretty unusually in this type of story, is about recognising the difference between justice and revenge. Max hopes that his pursuit of revenge for its own sake can be justified after the fact, but is able to percieve that it’s fucked he even thought that. This is a wildly more complex thought than you usually get from this type of thing.
The second game ruminates a lot on the nature of free will; how maybe it’s all an illusion, yada yada – “If you had done something differently, it wouldn’t be you.” But it also shows this idea used as a flimsy justification for a planned murder:
The obvious low-hanging-fruit thing to do (and I’m gonna do it) is compare to Max Payne 3, one of the most awfully written games around. It’s remarkable in how relentless its voiceover is, but it’s no exaggeration to say that none of it conveys anything. You could cut it all and the plot would still work, and we’d feel more for Max just left to our own imaginings, because he never talks about his feelings, and if he does they’re shallow and conflicting and don’t ring true.
But there’s one attempt, late-game, to say anything about Max’s state of mind: “It felt like I was detaching, that maybe this was revenge for something else, something buried deep in the past. Everyone who’d meant anything was gone.” In context, this is a really amusing line, as nothing as it is – in the absence of any cohesion to the character, the best they can do is a passing acknowledgment of that lack, and it ends up being the best line in the game.
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
I am sixty-plus hours into Remnant 2. I enjoy this game so much, I am willing to forgive the bad writing. R2 could be taught in game-design classes about what ludonarrative dissonance is and what not to do.
I’m told my character cares about Ford and Clementine. But my main character doesn’t know who these people are. (I know who those people are, but I played R1. And R2 tells me that my R2 avatar is someone different.) My R2 avatar cares more about these complete strangers than they do about Cass, someone who I traveled the wasteland with, who saved my life at least three times. The game gets even worse as it forgets about Ford half-way through.
There’s books in the world, immobile and always at least six screenfulls of text, that not only tell me nothing about what’s going on, but I can’t stop to read them because the game does not pause when you read (so enemies can attack you) and it’s a networked co-op experience (so my friends have nothing to do while I stare at walls of letters). The game is so embarrassed by these books, that when they have solutions to puzzles in the environment, that solution is always on the first page because they know no one wants to read the rest.
The worst part is how it’s that “no one got fired” level of writing. It’s not that the writing is, in and of itself, of poor quality. It’s the sheer inappropriateness of it all. I know more about Brad’s romantic life than I do about how the magic rocks work. Interstitial screens come with unsourced quotes that are paid by the word and tell me nothing except “can you believe they used to make iron”. Instead of making for a world of wonder and mystery, it’s gobbledygook clearly made up by someone after the fact that just fills space.
I’m sixty-plus hours in, and I just completed the “Archon” quest, which requires you to accumulate about 10 end-game items that might require two or more playthroughs. I have mixed feelings about this, because while I enjoy getting these weird things, there was absolutely nothing in the diegesis that would indicate why you need these particular things or how to get them. I learned it all from wikis. Which is fine for a gamer, but R2 could have been about exploring, it could have been about discovering mysteries instead of just shooting them. ☹️
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