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| The mess to outhype and outproduce the Dr Who 50th anniversary special… |
Games From The Multiverse-Beyond: Two Souls
DISCLAIMER: In light of this being my 150th post, I have decided to epxeriment with podcasting this very same article. If you think it sucks, let me know and simply click on the title to read it, instead! Intro music mashup courtesy of Fotis Wiz Frikiman Kyriazidis
I would not
call myself a gamer. I would describe me perhaps as a hopeless dreamer, a
half-assed romantic and/or a mean drunk philosopher, but to come out and admit
to people that I know shit about vidyagames would be purely hypocritical.
Especially seeing as how the only game I have recently been invested in was
ManHunt 2 and that was a bloody, violent mess that would have been better off
phoned in by M. Night Shyamalan than actually marketed as an honest-to-God,
super serious narrative.
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| Omg u gaiz they were the same person all along!!!1! #whatatwist #totallydidntseethatcoming |
But the
fact that Beyond marketed itself as the next step in video game story
presentation and was thought to have successfully
challenged a number of video game tropes, paving the way for a new wave of
story-based games is plainly ridiculous.
Many people
say that Beyond: Two Souls is Quantic Dreams making a movie that plays like a
game (which, by the way, was the same slogan that Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties
used) when in fact this is painfully NOT the case. That is because Beyond does
not go about presenting itself as a movie, but as a novel.
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A very shoddily written book with awkward dialogue, at that. Also, holy shit, Linaweaver wrote this shit? Nooooo! |
That is
because Beyond tries to innovate in 6 ways at once and fails every single step
of the way, not because of incompetence on the part of its developers but
because the developers actively chose to abandon the game at the hands of its
writer(s) who possibly have very little experience with how vidyagames actually
work. In the interest of not turning this article into a long-winded review of
the game, here are a few of its failings that I would like to address that pissed
me the hell off.
·
The idiotic artsy lack of a
User Interface.
There used
to be a time when game UIs were gigantic, clunky things that took up half of
the screen. There was a hell of buttons, prompts, save icons, inventory bars,
health bars etc, which forced the player to play the game at a good ¾ of the
screen (or, in the case of Ultima 6, in barely half of it). It was during that
time, when a trend designed to eliminate a
need for UIs in gameplay arose, which became a staple of horror games like
Silent Hill and RE, allowing the designers to clearly separate the crunchy part of the game from its
narrative.
And while
the idea worked for claustrophobic horror situations (and sloppy, campy
survival horror) it was considered a no-go zone for every other genre, because
the players needed to be aware at all times on their characters’ status and of
how much shit they were carrying on their person. Beyond tries to eschew that
entirely, trading menu screens for unclear QTEs and tiny white dots that are
lost to the player, thus breaking the story’s flow for a good 30 seconds as the
player is forced to twirl around like a dumbass, looking for the script.
· Beyond’s Ellen Page boner
I don’t
like Ellen Page. I don’t care for her as an actress, I thought Juno was a
hipsterrific piece of shit and I think she is built like a 12-year old girl. I
also cannot, in good faith, convince myself that she is capable of emoting
anything other than pure apathy or abject panic.
The fact
that Beyond tries to both promote her as some ultra-sexy almost-pornstar and as
action-movie star material bugged the fuck out of me. I had to put up with
Jodie during the entirety of the game, even as the game made me look at her
half-naked form and tried to convince me that I should somehow fap to her while
admiring her resolve and also believe that Jodie as a character is a living
breathing rapist-magnet that drives every man around her to actively want to
molest her.
Motherfucker,
if I wanted to masturbate to fantasies of almost rape, I would watch the scene
where Hulk tried to fuck Scarlet Widow into a bloody pulp. At least then I
would shoot my load just as Thor came into the screen and drown out my latent homosexuality amidst alien superhero carnage.
·
The waste of its William Dafoe
capability
As far as actors go, William Dafoe is more than
capable of pulling of a range of emotions but he is at his fucking best when he
is a cackling, campy motherfucker. Nathan, the games main antagonist mentor
guide plot device is instead this calm, measured dude that does sweet fuck
all except deliver one awesome line:
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| “You are not like them, Jodie and you never will be. You need to accept that.” |
William
Dafoe could have been the cheesy, supervillain antagonist that Beyond needed,
but instead he was the meh mad scientist it deserved.
·
The Trans-Story railroad:
You cannot
lose in Beyond. This much the developers made abundantly clear, ever since the
game was first announced. The game is impossible to fail at, resulting in the
immediate dissolution of any tension
or interest on your part as a gamer. Why the hell would you wiggle the
controller or slingshot your analog sticks, if Jodie is never in danger of
being shot? Why bother dodging punches or a machete swing with an elaborate
QTE, if the game won’t let anybody kill Jodie? Why bother pressing buttons or
flipping switches or making choices, if the story has decided that no, you are
going to see this shit through to the end, whether you like it or not?
By taking
failure out from the gameplay, you end up creating the narrative equivalent of
a shitty book, or better yet, Mary-Sue based fanfiction. If I know, from the
word go, that my character is not in danger, why should I even bother? That’s
like picking up a book that goes to great detail to tell me that no harm will ever come to the protagonist and
expecting me to still give a shit about it. Oh sure, the secondary characters
are fair game, but I don’t have any reason to give a shit about them especially
not when they are all one-dimensional asswipes that are rubbed into my face
until I develop story-based Stockholm Syndrome.
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| Three seasons and I still can’t find it in my heart to give a fuck about this character. |
But I could look past that, if Beyond gave you
anything for it in return: perhaps a branching path that took the story
elsewhere, or a series of choices that would perhaps end up making Jodie the
villain in the eyes of the player instead of everyone else. Maybe if any of my
choices in the game made the tiniest bit of difference, then perhaps it would
have had some redeeming factor.
Except it doesn’t, because nothing you do matters. Press shit to move the story
ahead as David Cage wrote it. Press nothing to David Cage can keep telling his
story. Fight back the advances of the asshole who is hitting on you just so the
game can Stockholm Syndrome you into liking him. Die, so your clone-baby from
another woman can take your place. Live, so you can get the same cutscene.
For all its stylish visuals, mocap bullshit and outrageous
budget, Beyond is a shoddily-written, selfish game that refuses to acknowledghe
his failings and tries to make you love it in its own, serial-killery way. So
let’s say, for a moment, that the game was, somehow different, just a tiny bit
better. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Earth 4-Gamma’s Beyond: Two Souls…
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| Written and directed by anyone other than David Cage. |
This
iteration of Beyond, features a number of stark differences, such as…
·
A linear narrative
After the
tragic destruction of David Cage’s notes following his demise in the house fire
caused by his flammable collection of Ellen Page waifu pillows, Quantic Dreams
is forced to go ‘fuck it’ and starts the story at the very beginning, with
Jodie’s birth. However, in an attempt to create some actual dramatic tension,
the writing team decide to have the adult role models be Jodie’s actual
parents, who are trying to raise a child while being scared as hell by the
invisible killer that has bonded with her and lashes out when she has tantrums.
In this
iteration, Jodie’s dad is her mentor-figure, used as a tutorial to teach her
how to control Aiden and hide her powers. Her mother, on the other hand, is
terrified of her daughter’s powers, but does her best to share her husband’s
enthusiasm (even as she hears at the things inside the bedroom walls that hiss
in the middle of the night and won’t let Jodie get rid of her night light even
after she is no longer afraid of the dark).
The parents
don’t meet horrible deaths, but are instead forced to give up their daughter,
after a fight with a group of bullies get out of hand, causing Aiden to lash out
and kill them. They watch, in horror, as their child is taken away and are
finally silenced when they come too close to the truth, later in the game.
This
version focuses on showing the players that Jodie is growing up, mastering her
powers, finding a friend and then an authority figure in Nathan Dawkins, who
remains however a neurotic control freak fixated on the death of his wife and
daughter. His initial clinical approach to Jodie changes when she reveals that
she can contact them and he decides to get the girl on her side, using her to
exploit her powers to look into the worlds on the other side of life. It is
this that gives the player the illusion that Nathan is actually a good, caring
man who fights tooth and nail for her when she is recruited by the CIA and
finally gives up his research in order to find an alternative in bringing his
family back to life. This is because…
· Nathan Hawkins and Ye-Etso are the
main antagonists
Instead of
wasting our time with bullshit international politics and second-rate Cold War spy
stories, this version of Beyond tries an entirely different approach.
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| The awesome approach |
Instead of Aiden being her ghost dead baby brother,
Aiden is one of the creatures that slipped into our reality along with the
demon Ye-Etso, when the Navajo shamans attempted to bind the demons from the
Other Side to their service to kill the white men and failed. While Ye-Etso was
the big bad motherfucker that remained on Earth and plagued the world as a
small-time Lovecraftian entity, Aiden instead tried to find a home in this
place of matter and form, Possessing human beings and adapting to the rules of
Earth. Where Ye-Etso is all muscle, Aiden is intead learning to adapt to the
rules of this reality and finds a perfect, symbiotic host in Jodie.
But they are not alone. The Navajo shamans were not
the only people who made contact with the Other Side. Other spirits have also
slipped into reality and hid among humanity, while others have been bound and
the secrets of their world have been forcefully divined from their minds. In
this version, a long line of necromancers, diviners and warriors who fight with
forcefully bound spirits exists in the world and the masses are just beginning
to take notice. This is what causes the government to gain an interest in Jodie
and to create the DPA, in an attempt to harness the powers of the Other Side to
their own benefit.
Jodie is sent to find and assassinate one such
necromancer in Asia, a man who binds the spirits of the Other Side into the newly
dead to spread a campaign of terror. It is there that she discovers the truth
about Aiden’s origins and Nathan’s plan to find the places of power and harness
them for his own purposes. This is what drives Jodie away from him, forces her
to go on the run but also allows for Nathan to bind and control (to some
extent) Ye-Etso, after Jodie banishes it back to the other side.
When Jodie and Nathan meet again in the end-game,
Nathan is a technological necromancer, possessed by one of the oldest, most
malevolent and hungriest things on Earth. And she has to stop him.
· Jodie
is not a super victim
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| The homeless sequence stays, however. |
The tragic death of 4-Gamma’s
David Cage allowed the writing staff to get rid of the post-it notes that
detailed Jodie’s molestation scenes and allowed them to re-write Jodie as an
angry, but ultimately good, person, a knight in sour armor. After discovering
the terrible truth about Aiden’s nature and she runs from the people who are
trying to access the Other Side, Jodie finds herself trekking across the
country, locking horns with necromancers and people who have also tried (with
various degrees of success) to bind the spirit-creatures.
In Washington, she fights a
serial killer created by a death cult. In Iowa, she is cornered by a team of
CIA operatives who have access to anti-spirit technology, courtesy of Nathan
Hawkins. In Utah, she is aided by a team of mystics against a rent in realitythat
causes the first insurgence of the Other Side into our world and prevents the
apocalypse at the very last second. In Nevada, she fights and banishes the
Ye-Etso by the skin of her teeth, aided by cryptic messages by Aiden, receiving
insights of his time among the living.
When she ends up homeless in
California, Jodie is broken by her encounter with the being and shot by Nathan
just as she tries to escape. She starves and is left out in the cold there,
trying to stay hidden but is finally force out of hiding when Nathan finds her
family and threatens her that he will kill them if she does not give herself
up. This is the turning point in the story, when the player has to choose Jodie’s
final path. With Ye-Etso’s banishment, Aiden has grown in power and is a thing
of fearsome power. If she gives herself up, Nathan gains the means to enter and
harness the other side. If not, she dooms her parents and cuts a swathe of
destruction across the country.
What’s important is that this
deviates from the initial idea of the game and turns Beyond into an action game
with boss fights and some rpg elements. While this iteration does not feature
too much variation in the storyline, it does allow the player to choose a
wildly different course of action later in the game, when Jodie has truly
become a force to be reckoned with. It is important to note however, that the
choice that is made at this point changes the endgame entirely. Giving up to
Nathan makes him take Jodie with him and use her and Aiden as the battery to
power the Black Sun condenser (yes, there is only one condenser in this
version, instead of three). This allows the Ye-Etso to escape the Other side
along with thousands of its kind and swarm the world, beginning the apocalypse,
ending in a climactic battle between Necromancer Nathan and Jodie-Aiden. In
this ending, she becomes a beacon of hope for the living, a superhero in her
own right.
The other choice turns Jodie
into pretty much Mystic Hulk, tearing up the forces of the CIA, their few bound
spirit-slaves and ends in a confrontation between Ye-Etso/Nathan and her in the
crumbling ruins of the DPA headquarters. While this choice does not lead to the
end of the world, it does end Jodie’s world, once and for all. She has become
public enemy number one and something way past human, the world’s very first
arcane supervillain.
This version of Beyond is
definitely not the narrative, artsy experiment that exploded with pretentiousness
all over our faces. Its drama is not based on the idea of writing a sorta
horror story with cheap, dirty attempts to tug at our heartstrings. Instead, it
is the story of the world’s first necromantic superhuman, making her mark on
history and tearing shit up like, a lot.
Is that a shallow version? Is
that another half-assed attempt at a money-grabbing scheme? Perhaps it is. Do I
give a shit?
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| Nooooope! |
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