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btw this is one of the best games ever made.
finished it a while ago and i still can't get my mind completely around it all. the game is totally driven by the story, and nothing else really matters, so this isn't a game for everybody. the gameplay is pretty awful - the developers admitted that they just tacked it on because they knew an adventure game wouldn't sell - but it's the kind of thing you get used to by the end. i actually finished like the last 8 hours of this game in one sitting, which i didn't think i'd be able to do with this game. i kept picking it up and putting it down after an hour due to getting irritated/bored, but the last couple sections are a lot more interesting and you aren't just spending HOURS UPON HOURS dragging yourself through some overly long level. i found that the length of the levels hurt this game more than anything else, so when they started breaking things up more and keeping the story more involved in the battle segments, the game picked up considerably.
i kinda get the feeling that a lot of people like this game IRONICALLY, or are taking the SO BAD IT'S GOOD mentality when playing it. i don't know how alone in this i am, but i completely disagree with this evaluation. the game is just extremely different. it does a lot of things WRONG, but i don't really think it does any of it badly.
i think the strong point of the game has to be the fact that you can very easily rally behind the main characters. you really get to know them on some deeper levels that most games do not ever endeavor to reach. this is something that's always irritated me about games. in an inordinate amount of story-based games, they make the player character this amorphous blob onto which the player can superimpose all kinds of idiotic superhero/villain fantasies. that's fine i guess, but i don't really see how that is a particularly rewarding storytelling experience. i'm sure it COULD BE if you saw games do more with that and use that character to make the player actually address how they feel about things outside of stock childish conflicts, but i've never seen that EVER and it's invariably just some idiotic stock good/evil polarization in some empty socratic dialogue where you play the imbecile. useless propaganda tangent, but whatever, this game is the opposite. this game has great characters that you can very easily get inside, particularly york(ESPECIALLY york). i've always found it a lot more interesting when you view a game from some established viewpoint, like a character with a history, rather than as some purely objective, empty outsider perspective that most games elect to take. to me that makes the game a lot more vivid and real, and helps you get inside the story a lot more. this is doubly so when the game has interesting characters that you want to know more about.
and at the end of the game, i'm not even sure if you're supposed to know how much of the game was real and how much was imagined. pretty much every character in the game has some sort of identifiable mental problem, and there's this distinct separation between how things truly are physically and how they are perceived by the player. but it doesn't even really matter. there are a lot of things that are probably not definitively knowable, but the things that you DO know are what really matters. this is hard to explain and might simply be how the game hit me, but the game has these key elements that really made me feel something. the game is like this psychological disaster but at its core you know certain things to be true, and nothing else especially matters.
anyway, york. what a great goddamn character. in the game you basically play zach, the friend of york(presumably imaginary) that he continually talks to throughout his life. the vast majority of york's dialogue in the game is directed at zach, and it's not the way games usually do it. traditionally when you have some sort of narrator it's the type that just feeds you information of some sort regarding what to do next in the game. that's not the case here. i mentioned that they literally write york as your FRIEND rather than as your guide, and this is pretty accurate. york just talks to you. it rarely ever involves anything that you literally need to do, as what's apparent to york is apparent to you anyway, he just says what's on his mind to you. what makes this more interesting is the fact that york is pretty weird with everybody else and has difficulty communicating with pretty much everybody, but you get to see the real york. they all think he's cold, but you know that he's not. he opens up to you, and tells you very honestly how he feels, and whatever else is on his mind, while not doing that with really anybody else. it's a pretty interesting dynamic where everyone in the game thinks york is a bit of a lunatic(he is anyway) but you get to see him on the inside and see that he's a pretty decent, likable guy. like i said before, really opposite of what every other game does. rather than bend over backwards to make you the superhero within the story, the game instead goes out of its way to make you nothing more than the main character's friend. it's a truly brilliant use of the unique narrative perspective of videogames, and one they do exceptionally well. on those merits alone, i would call this unquestionably the most innovative videogame story out there, and the best singular example of what the medium has to offer the world of storytelling.
kinda hard talking about this game at length without massive spoilers, but i don't want to ruin anything for anybody. everything i wrote here is pretty vague.
basically, everybody who owns an xbox360 or a ps3 should buy this game. i'm not familiar with a game currently available for either system that is even remotely close to being as good as this. i went into this game with unreasonably high expectations, and it ended up completely surpassing them. watch some of the random videos on youtube or whatever and if it's at all intriguing, go pick it up. this game was somehow released as a budget title because somebody along the line didn't think we'd be smart enough for this, but they were wrong. this is apparently the reason why i bought this stupid xbox360, and i'm sure i'm not the only person who has felt this way, or will feel this way.
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Deadly Premonition