Red Dead Redemption 2 sure is the game of all time...

(Spoilers below, of course)

Overall Thoughts

This is going to be more complainy than an average shrine, because I sure do have things to bitch about. However, this is by far my most played game in my library. I regularly think that this game frustrates the shit out of me, but it's still the most played game in my library. I have so many critiques because I've had a lot of time in-game to notice things, and because there are some aspects of the game that are perfect by comparison and sort of held back by the issues. But I guess I have to admit I love this game because I've made a whole shrine for it right? With that out of the way, time to cry about it.

The things that drove me insane

Have you ever wanted to play a game with obnoxious, sluggish controls?
It was amazing going through the tutorial in a snowy area. As I moved around pressing on the keyboard and watching Arthur slooowly respond to my keyboard presses, I really felt like I was trudging through thigh-deep snow. Except when chapter 2 started and the gang left the snowy area, the feeling of wading through snow persisted. Every action you start with a keypress has a delay before the action actually happens. Additionally, every action has an animation that can't and won't stop once it's started. Some actions are slower than others, but this becomes even more of a problem when, for example, you've just started skinning a bear and a group of bounty hunters runs up on you to kill you. Is it really so immersion-breaking to be able to cancel the action?

The game makes it hard to focus on, or interact with, specific objects in the world. Often I'll be standing right next to the object I want to loot, but I have to do a song and dance of angling my camera and moving around to actually get the game to register that yes, I am looking at this teeny tiny box of cigarettes. Additionally, it can help to step away from the item and step back, or scoot over. But there's this weird thing where there's almost like a "minimum step size" that Arthur has to take for each movement around the map, so incremental adjustments aren't a thing. This is less obvious in the large open world, but dealing with this inside a house or a tent is downright painful.

The other amazing thing is that there's not a very consistent rule for what buttons will do what at any given moment. For example when you get into a conversation, it's hard to know whether one button will be the "nice" option or the "mean" option. To talk to someone, you need to look at them (and hope the game doesn't think you're looking at your horse) and right click and hold. But wait, if you have your gun out, now instead of talking to them you're threatening them. Whooops! To throw things off even more, between online mode and story mode, the controls sometimes change. I still have to get a screenshot of this, but the cooking buttons get completely remapped for no reason.

Do you like it when morals are incredibly simplified and boiled down to a binary of good and bad?
Throughout the game, there's a sliding spectrum where you can see whether your actions lately have been honorable or dishonorable. Many actions will give you either positive or negative honor, so you can decide what type of flavor you want your story to have. It's extremely funny though that in this game, you can rob and murder your way across the countryside, decimate entire towns. But then you throw a couple fish back into the water, or move a couple of haybales around camp (both honorable actions), and then you're good to go. I imagine this is because the game creators wanted people to be able to experience either flavor of game they choose, without having to hold back from partaking in most game activities.

The game takes this specific linear view of morality, good and bad, and is constantly beating you over the head with it. This shows up particularly often in the randomized encounters you find across the map. For example, the blind beggar guy is always talking about how "Eternity awaits! But which one?" to randomly make you think about a potential afterlife. Then there's also this random guy at a camp, who makes a big show of how he trusts you and he can just sense that you're a good person, which is really funny if you're playing with low honor.

Have you ever wanted to just watch a movie because you're tired of making impactful decisions?
For a game that people talk about having tons of player choice, all these choices you make don't really add up to much variation by the end of the game. The game is an expert at giving you choices, but making the impact of those choices insignificant to the story or the game mechanics. Take horses for example: Yes, you can choose your horse and customize the hell out of it. But even the fastest horse is only a small percentage faster than the slowest horse.
At the final mission as Arthur you're presented with two choices. You get the same two choices no matter what you've done the whole game. The part that is locked in by the time you accept the mission is what "honor version" of the ending you're getting. I've sort of heard that the different honor add a lot of variance, but I'm not really convinced. There aren't any quests that are opened or closed to you based on your honor level. The honor level is more of a window dressing on events that are going to happen either way.
The other thing with this is that one of the two endings don't even make sense. The final decision is whether you decide to go help John try to escape so that he can get out of this life and be a father to his kid, or you can go try to ... retrieve the gang's funds yourself? Okay, sure, but what the fuck are you gonna do with the money? You're dying of tuberculosis. Nobody in their right mind would actually make this decision. It doesn't even make sense for low-honor Arthur.
No matter what decision you make, it's all a bit futile. Maybe that's the point and I missed it. But even if you're the goodest of good Arthurs - no matter how much money you make or what you do, you can't change the future where Jack Marston ends up turning to the outlaw life at the end of RDR1. I guess that's the nature of prequels, where the train has to arrive at its destination no matter what you do.

Do updates to online games annoy you?
Unfortunately, Red Dead Online is completely ignored by Rockstar at this point. Red Dead Online could have its own separate critique about how this portion of the game is just designed to make you grind and spend money on microtransactions, but this is kind of just a side-game to the Story Mode.

The things that made me keep coming back

Have you ever wanted to develop an unhealthy attachment for your videogame horse? Seriously, the immersion is extremely well done. I think part of this is because the game wants you to think about every little thing, so you're constantly having to manage and think about your horse as well as yourself, making sure it's fed and petting it to keep its stamina up. Your horse is the thing that gets you just about anywhere on the map, and if you accidentally leave your horse somewhere, it's the kind of mistake I only had to make once. This additional creature becomes your lifeline in the game, and there's all this incentive to take care of it. There are also all these little interactions with the horse where Arthur compliments it, and I think "yeah you're right, this is a great horse."

Have you ever wanted to ignore all the main quests and just pick flowers and hunt deer forever?
There's no shortage of dicking-around content, side quests, and weird challenges if you want that kind of thing. You can really make this game take forever if you want. It's great that you can jump in to "just vibe" or jump in for an action-packed story mission. Half of the time I hop into the game thinking it's time to go play a story mission, but I get distracted because I stumble upon a three-star cougar, and then that means I finish up one of the challenges, and ooh I can just get the next one if I do this or that... It has all these rabbit holes that are just as engaging as the story in my opinion. You can really turn a playthrough into a long affair if you want to.

Have you ever thought of a dumb minor thing you might randomly want to do, and wondered if the game implemented a mechanic for it?
Well with this game, they probably did. There's interactions for almost every little thing, from kidnapping a guy and putting him on the railroad tracks, to petting dogs, to train rides, to the little conversations you can have while playing poker with people. Someone had to think of each of those things and set them up to be part of the game, and they really do add up. It's clear that a lot of love and care was put into this game with all these details, by the actors and the animators and everyone else. The game is absolutely brimming with flavor and personality.

Do you like to lose yourself in a game's immersion?
I've mentioned immersion, but I need to go into more detail about it. Part of this might be related to the super long animations that go with skinning an animal or picking a flower, or it might be related to all the little interactions like moving hay bales. But it's easy to get lost in the sauce and feel like you're truly there.

One instance of this is at the theater in Saint Denis. There's a magician guy and he has his assistant shoot him, and he catches the bullet as his magic act. The crowd starts to question his powers so he asks someone from the crowd step up and shoot him. I had Arthur jump at the opportunity; it sounded fun. The dromroll played as the magician said to shoot him, so Arthur pointed his gun at the guy and pulled the trigger - and he caught it. For a solid second, I thought "Okay how the hell did this guy do this? How did I not kill him?" I completely forgot that this was a videogame, so they could do any number of funky videogame tricks to just make sure the magician took no damage. This might be hard for a stage magician to do, but this is easy to do in a videogame. And the game tricked me for a few minutes into thinking of this guy as a real stage magician.

Do you love a good story?
The story may not have that much variance even between the high and low honor endings, but it's a very good story nonetheless. And it very effectively communicates the emotional beats it wants to potray. The stress builds throughout the entire game as the gang slowly falls apart, and you can really feel the helplessness as Dutch and Micah continue to make stupider and stupider decisions rather than listen. There's also the high points, like sitting around the campfire and singing songs with the gang after Sean gets back. There are terrifying moments, like accidentally walking into Lakay on a foggy night at 3am, and getting jumped by a bunch of Night Folk with machetes. There's a scene that conveys an emotion hard to describe, but it feels like "we're so back, baby," when Pronghorn Ranch needs to be saved from those baddies over at Hanging Dog Ranch, and John's the guy to do it.

Do you like themes of vengeance?
This game might not be amazing about having philosophical thoughts about morals, but it can really let you feel like a righteously angry badass. Two particular missions from this game made particularly memorable gaming experiences - American Venom, and Blood Feuds, Ancient and Modern. There's nothing quite like sprinting up a mountainside like a juggernaut, blowing away every dude in your path with a shotgun, while yelling for Micah Bell all the way. This time, you (the player as John) are inevitable, bringing a bloody end to the one guy that ruined everything. That's extremely satisfying.

Do you like nature but hate walking?
This game has the backdrop of the most gorgeous nature scenery I've seen in a game. Prettymuch the entire map lives rent-free in my head because it's so nice to look at. It captures an essence of a place that may have never existed - or if it did, it's all but erased. The sort of place where you could go anywhere and look over any hillside, where now you'd only find fences and suburbs or farms. Or even if you went far into the past to visit this sort of place, you might have just found thirst and bugs and uncomfortable temperatures. There's something to be said where even in this picture they paint, it's a sad picture, because the map still has remnants and reminders of the Indigenous people who once freely lived there, and now in the game they're all relegated to the Wapiti village. In the game Dutch keeps complaining about how America's not wild anymore - and we're sitting on the opposite end of that, on a computer, probably in a building. The open landscapes feel very close and almost real, but so far away and impossible despite its beauty. It makes me lament about colonialism and climate change in ways I didn't expect.

Closing

I might have more to say about this game later on, and in case I do, this was last updated on 7/24/2023. I've spent too long playing to not put my thoughts somewhere out there, even if I don't have a real point to make.

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