by lcom
Showing 1-5 of 5 items
Tensei Megami Shin: Performa #FireEmblemIsAlsoHere
I had a dream that GTA Online had little mini puzzle rooms / dungeons that were sprinkled inside random buildings every time you log in, so that way there will little repeatable solo side things you could discover and do if you didn't wanted more non-competitive things to do while wandering around the open world. Then about an hour after I woke up I realized this is basically what the single player offered, but just more smaller side missions rather than a small handful of randomly populated ones. Somehow I had spent like 60 hours playing the single player but spent all that time on the main story and almost none on side content. So I went ahead and jumped back into the single player, and almost immediately discovered why moved to online and never looked back. The only thing I remember about the main story was my disappointment with the plot - how Franklin is underwritten and is no more than a seat filler once Michael and The Other Guy meet back up, and how after the climax the only things that have changed for these characters is that Franklin has lost his repo job and bought a new house. Okay, I guess also the other two have found closure on a major loose end from their past, but that change doesn't actually alter the state of their life, so all that's happened is a defining trait has been removed and so they've become even less interesting characters. But uninteresting isn't what pushed me away from the single player. It's just pure unpleasantness. I try to only play as Franklin because he's the only character that doesn't cause me some level of disgust to spend time as (and also the least written character? You don't say...) But even as him, the gross caricatures isn't limited to the majority of playable characters, but extend to every NPC as well. In 10 minutes of returning to the single player I find myself minimally willingly enlisted by a self absorbed paparazzi to sneak onto private property to to capture footage of the sexual escapades of a celebrity couple (who thru forced-overheard dialog are clearly also unpleasant people in an entirely unhealthy relationship). The only postive side moments I can recall are using a bulldoser to save a man from a gas tanker about to explode, and meeting a dog who leads you to rescue another people, and then turns out to have been a hallucination all along? But other than that, I could go meet the (writer-intentionally) psychotic athletic woman, or I could go rescue my son and on the ride back have him lay out his internal rationalization of how being a death-threat slinging internet troll is just good fun, or go help out the self-appointed border patrol round up and deport legal citizens. Like a lot of the writing is clearly from that place of "humor from the absurdity of just how tasteless it is" which as a whole - to put it lightly - hasn't aged well, but for me it wasn't even real humor at the time. But it also sets it opposite to the "games as power fantasy" principle. I don't want to help or even spend time with any of these people. If the game's power is "you have these tools of violence, you can pass and serve judgement on anyone" then honestly I find that the people I most want to wipe off the map are the people with the most writing, that you get to know best. And yet, you can't just deliver your son to the cultist and drive away whistling to yourself. More than that, you can't make any positive change to this world. And there's almost a consistent ethos to be seen - Given only the tools to destroy and then to show a world that does its best to convince you to destroy it. But that's neither what I want to do, nor what I want to be shown. So it continues to be true for me that the best version of GTAV is the online world, with its minimal written characters, played offline so you don't have to contend with the audience of players who do want to be presented the worst of humanity and the tools to wipe it away.
