I Beat Beyond: Two Souls

I'm....not really sure what to say.  I'm not sure what I want to say, as I never even so much as posted that I had started playing it, meaning I've gone from start to finish without saying a single thing about it.  And of course, given the type of game that this is, there's the looming problem of what should I say about it?  I don't want to spoil anything and talking about most any facet of the game is almost guaranteed to spoil -something-, which makes it difficult, especially when I don't want to go through the effort of spoiler tagging the post and/or inserting a jump break.  Perhaps if I were to speak a little more in-depth about the game (which I may still do) then I'll worry about it then, but for now I'm not so fussed.

I liked Beyond:  Two Souls.  On the list of things I can and should say, that is pretty much at the top of it.  I liked the game and I definitely think it's something that everyone should give a shot.  It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and it'll get a lot of hate (it already did, really), but it's a wholly different experience than most games on the market, and it's something worth played if just for that.  For all the complaints about stagnation and "booo, I'm tired of waist-high wall, shootymans games", when you're presented with something that is legitimately not that, you should fucking play it or shut up a little.  While, yes, there are shootyman bits as we saw from at least a couple trailers, they're certainly not handled like any other game of that particular genre, so I wouldn't even worry about it.  Saying this as someone who...you know, played it and whatnot.

In the same vein of "It's different, so you should play it", I do think I liked Heavy Rain more than Beyond.  I'll have to replay it sometime (especially since I can leave my PS3 on long enough for the Move patch and I also have Move peripherals) but Heavy Rain just seemed a little more...'crafted', I think is the word I want.  Beyond feels like it defers more to Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe than it directs them, potentially because of their fantastic acting abilities, so you get moments in the game where it's awesome because it's Ellen Page or Willem Dafoe and not simply because that part of the game is particularly good for them to simply enhance that.  With less-storied actors, it wouldn't be nearly as memorable, I think, which is an issue in itself, because a great story makes actors; actors don't make great stories.

Still, as stated, Beyond was a great experience and one that I can't help but recommend if only for the departure from the norm.  Someone described Quantic Dream games as "Western Visual Novels" and I can't help but agree with that assessment, even if they're a bit more interactive than that.  Whatever it is, it's a breed all to itself which is a bit unfortunate for now.  I don't know what I'd do for a modern remake of Snatcher in the vein of Heavy Rain.  Probably not good things.  Probably bad things.  Very bad things.  If Kojima wasn't stuck making Metal Gear Solid games over and over again, maybe we could have hoped for that, but oh well.  As long as someone else runs with the style and turns it into a genre all its own, I'll be more than happy.

really though, Willem Dafoe was pretty damn great in every scene he was in

We Want The Kid's Gloves Off, Right?

We've all had the moment described above, whether or not it stems from the same issue or the same game or not.  (It's a Penny Arcade comic, btw, which might not show up since the site is getting absolutely slammed for some reason.)  Basically the issue comes about when we start getting tutorials for things that honestly need no tutorials for us, since by far the most annoying ones are the ones in shooters telling us how to take cover, how to shoot a guy and how to run of all things and those things are, by and large, similar from one game to another.  Usually not the exact same of course but close enough that a few moments fiddling about with the conroller leaves us fairly assured that we know what the hell is going on.  So we complain, we bitch and we moan about how these forced tutorials are still around in the day and age where they are clearly not needed because we don't need hand-holding, essentially.

That's what we tell ourselves, of course, but is it the truth?  Are we, as gamers in general, well-enough on our own to really get by without these things, this perceived hand-holding in all forms?  After seeing a few games I enjoyed quite a lot panned for what were thrown about as 'plots holes' and 'poor writing'....I'm not too sure.  Obviously, there's a difference between being told "Press X to Jump" and throwing out a heavy-handed explanation for every little thing that isn't necessary.  Few games are accused of over-writing, though there are certainly some games that this is leveled at and rightly so, but it really stems from us being spoon-fed narrative and complaining when even one tiny bridge isn't made for us which I think is basically the same issue at heart here.

While I'm not suggesting that actual plot holes are perfectly fine if someone can hand-wave them away with a line of reasoning only derived from someone with a burning passion for whatever it is he's trying to defend, I'm saying that a leap of logic that most people could make off-handedly is, in fact, not a plot hole and shouldn't be spoken of as one.  There is a difference of course, and it'll be hard to really explain the difference without spoilers so I'm going to have to actually spoil a few things, but I'm going to be trying a new method here to discuss them to keep the pure pure and allow the rest of us to figure it out.  I can't have fancy spoiler tags that I know of in here and I can't eloquently black bar/hover for text like on SomethingAwful, but that principle is more or less the driving one here.

As you may or may not know, I really really liked Heavy Rain and as such my opinion of its writing and narrative is probably a little skewed, but I believe I can talk about it at least a little bit objectively.  Disregarding the line where I say "While I may hand-wave away the plot-holes I don't like" and then focusing more on the part directly after it stating, "as most of them can be rationally explained away in a way that isn't giving too much credit" you can see this is sort of a philosophy that I've been cooking up for quite a while and it's really just taken me this much time and evidence to really put it down in a way that makes sense.  Of course, the unfortunate bit here is that I haven't been able to play Heavy Rain again since that post because of the Move Patch that I cannot be arsed to download for being something between one or two gigs.  My internet is nowhere near capable of pulling that down, so even though I have a Move Wand and have wanted to experience the game with it...well, there's just that little step in-between.  I'll get it sorted some day after I clear my incredible backlog of games.

The above was said for a reason, as the unfortunate bit about it means that the narrative and story is nowhere near as fresh in my mind as I feel it should be to talk on it, but I'm going to attempt to anyways as there's always the one 'plot hole' that sticks out in my head as well as the one that I can't explain without giving the game too much credit to show the contrast here of my ideas.  Of course, this goes without saying but I'm going to be spoiling the game (and one other one, see the tags) pretty heavily, so I'm inserting a page break.