ItWasMeantToBe19
Banned
Hmm, rented this from the library and I'm 65% done according to the game and I'm feeling pretty disappointed. Some of the reasons why:
1. Extremely bad opening power-set.
Your beginning projectile attack is just pathetic and makes enemies seem like infinite HP equipped gods because your projectile does no damage. Meanwhile, the "throw dirt in their eyes attack" is impossibly OP and allows enemies to be one-hit killed afterward having dirt throw in their eyes and might be the most powerful attack in the game against normal enemies. So you spend most of your time in combat in the opening throwing dirt in enemies eyes and it's deeply unsatisfying. Especially since the normal enemies can only dodge getting dirt thrown in their eyes by jumping away but this method of dodging doesn't make any in-game sense. They still get dirt throw in the eyes during the jumping animation, but... they just don't get affected by they have five seconds of unexplained invulnerability. It just comes off as really odd and unsatisfying.
2. No platforming.
There's been two platforming sections in this game so far which feels extremely limited compared to what I remember from the prior games. There's also almost no skill or effort involved in traversal either... You just fly up buildings and then you fly from building to building. It feels cool at first, but there's no effort involved and it starts to feel really unsatisfying after a while. The climbing seems really poorly tested also with my character constantly getting stuck and failing to grab ledges (maybe Sucker Punch thought they didn't need to focus on it since they thought no one would climb in this game since you can just fly up buildings). Sucker Punch seemed to think it was too tedious climbing up buildings but removing platforming seems like a ridiculous attempt at a fix.
3. This game is very Launch Title-y.
There's almost no side-content and all of the side-content is bad. The only side missions that take more than a few seconds (I really think most side content missions can be finished in less than 20 seconds) are where you rush the HQs of the bad guys and destroy these HQs. But these side-missions are terrible because they just throw 50 enemies at you at once and you have to hit-and-run over and over again, creating a tedious experience.
Also, the main character in prior games couldn't swim because he had electric powers so you were supposed to avoid water... However, there's no reason for why Deslin can't swim but Sucker Punch didn't have a gameplay engine with swimming in it because the prior games didn't have one. So if you fall in the water... you just press a button to get out of the water after two seconds of a black loading screen. It feels like 15 years old and is kind of hilarious.
4. Nothing happens in the story but you can't skip any of it.
This game is really technically rough and is so much so that they have no cutscene skip button. This is problematic since the prior games really encouraged multiple playthroughs to try out the good and evil paths, but that's hard to imagine doing in a game where you have to watch the long opening cutscenes over again.
Speaking of the story... Nothing seems to have happened in it? You get the setup to the story (you have superpowers and need to save your tribe), you find out that there's conspiracy stuff going on with the bad guys if you play the first side-content mission. And after that... nothing has happened in the plot. You gain some powers and friends while moving nothing forward. Your friends go through character development in literally ten minutes while the main character and his brother have no changed at all so far.
But the real reason I wanted to make this thread was the hilariously psychotic drug politics in the game. Infamous Second Son has your first superhero sidekick turn out to be a serial killer. There are ways you can have interesting serial killer anti-heroes in fiction, but Infamous attempts none of these paths and takes the bold opinion that mass murdering drug dealers isn't great but is OK.
When you first encounter your sidekick (Fetch), the bad guys in the government are saying that she's a serial killer out killing innocent people. Deslin reacts angrily to this by arguing that they're just drug dealers... Like this makes them non-human and OK to murder. Then, when you catch this serial killer, Deslin's police brother makes the salient point that she is a serial killer and should be in prison for the rest of her life. Deslin disagrees that she's that much of a bad guy (in the good guy path) and tries to redeem her.
When you go on your first mission with Fetch, you soon come across a group of drug dealers murdered in cruel and unusual ways by Fetch. Deslin reacts with... mild disapproval. He walks over these people who were just butchered and basically goes "tsk, tsk, don't do that" to Fetch. Fetch immediately learns her lesson from this mild verbal wrist slap and doesn't murder the drug dealers next time.
In the second mission with Fetch, you clear out houseboats of sex workers before you blow up the houseboats for carrying drugs. The game treats all sex workers dismissively (as objects to be saved), but I'm not going to be as hard on the game for this because all media is bad about respecting sex workers. What's hilarious is that you (if you're a good guy) have left drug dealers knocked out or paralyzed on those boathouses from earlier combat, but then Fetch blows up these boathouses (presumable murdering the drug dealers trapped nearby) and then brags about how good of a person she now is. It's fucking hilarious how poorly separated the gameplay and story were in this situation, I'm sorry.
Infamous Second Son is all about "oh man, there's a police state coming!" and then immediately turns around and praises the war on drugs and views criminals as mild as drug dealers as non-human. If Fetch can be so easily "redeemed" in the eyes of the game despite being a mass murderer, then drug dealers can't be human. If drug dealers aren't human, then basically 80% of people in prison in America (who are drug dealers or worse) aren't human either. So Infamous Second Son starts out warning of a police state and then implicitly agrees that the people kept in prison are scum and that killing them wouldn't be that bad of a thing.
It's a game with such conflicted ideas that I have to laugh.
tl;dr: Infamous Second Son removes the series' great traversal and movement and replaces it with flying which is boring. It also fixes none of the series' problems and has bad powers and suffers from being a launch title. But the politics of the story are so dumb and contradictory that it becomes hilarious on inspection.
Note about thread title: Duterte is the new president of the Philippines. He has brought a reign of terror to his country by encouraging the murder of all suspected drug dealers and drug addicts.
1. Extremely bad opening power-set.
Your beginning projectile attack is just pathetic and makes enemies seem like infinite HP equipped gods because your projectile does no damage. Meanwhile, the "throw dirt in their eyes attack" is impossibly OP and allows enemies to be one-hit killed afterward having dirt throw in their eyes and might be the most powerful attack in the game against normal enemies. So you spend most of your time in combat in the opening throwing dirt in enemies eyes and it's deeply unsatisfying. Especially since the normal enemies can only dodge getting dirt thrown in their eyes by jumping away but this method of dodging doesn't make any in-game sense. They still get dirt throw in the eyes during the jumping animation, but... they just don't get affected by they have five seconds of unexplained invulnerability. It just comes off as really odd and unsatisfying.
2. No platforming.
There's been two platforming sections in this game so far which feels extremely limited compared to what I remember from the prior games. There's also almost no skill or effort involved in traversal either... You just fly up buildings and then you fly from building to building. It feels cool at first, but there's no effort involved and it starts to feel really unsatisfying after a while. The climbing seems really poorly tested also with my character constantly getting stuck and failing to grab ledges (maybe Sucker Punch thought they didn't need to focus on it since they thought no one would climb in this game since you can just fly up buildings). Sucker Punch seemed to think it was too tedious climbing up buildings but removing platforming seems like a ridiculous attempt at a fix.
3. This game is very Launch Title-y.
There's almost no side-content and all of the side-content is bad. The only side missions that take more than a few seconds (I really think most side content missions can be finished in less than 20 seconds) are where you rush the HQs of the bad guys and destroy these HQs. But these side-missions are terrible because they just throw 50 enemies at you at once and you have to hit-and-run over and over again, creating a tedious experience.
Also, the main character in prior games couldn't swim because he had electric powers so you were supposed to avoid water... However, there's no reason for why Deslin can't swim but Sucker Punch didn't have a gameplay engine with swimming in it because the prior games didn't have one. So if you fall in the water... you just press a button to get out of the water after two seconds of a black loading screen. It feels like 15 years old and is kind of hilarious.
4. Nothing happens in the story but you can't skip any of it.
This game is really technically rough and is so much so that they have no cutscene skip button. This is problematic since the prior games really encouraged multiple playthroughs to try out the good and evil paths, but that's hard to imagine doing in a game where you have to watch the long opening cutscenes over again.
Speaking of the story... Nothing seems to have happened in it? You get the setup to the story (you have superpowers and need to save your tribe), you find out that there's conspiracy stuff going on with the bad guys if you play the first side-content mission. And after that... nothing has happened in the plot. You gain some powers and friends while moving nothing forward. Your friends go through character development in literally ten minutes while the main character and his brother have no changed at all so far.
But the real reason I wanted to make this thread was the hilariously psychotic drug politics in the game. Infamous Second Son has your first superhero sidekick turn out to be a serial killer. There are ways you can have interesting serial killer anti-heroes in fiction, but Infamous attempts none of these paths and takes the bold opinion that mass murdering drug dealers isn't great but is OK.
When you first encounter your sidekick (Fetch), the bad guys in the government are saying that she's a serial killer out killing innocent people. Deslin reacts angrily to this by arguing that they're just drug dealers... Like this makes them non-human and OK to murder. Then, when you catch this serial killer, Deslin's police brother makes the salient point that she is a serial killer and should be in prison for the rest of her life. Deslin disagrees that she's that much of a bad guy (in the good guy path) and tries to redeem her.
When you go on your first mission with Fetch, you soon come across a group of drug dealers murdered in cruel and unusual ways by Fetch. Deslin reacts with... mild disapproval. He walks over these people who were just butchered and basically goes "tsk, tsk, don't do that" to Fetch. Fetch immediately learns her lesson from this mild verbal wrist slap and doesn't murder the drug dealers next time.
In the second mission with Fetch, you clear out houseboats of sex workers before you blow up the houseboats for carrying drugs. The game treats all sex workers dismissively (as objects to be saved), but I'm not going to be as hard on the game for this because all media is bad about respecting sex workers. What's hilarious is that you (if you're a good guy) have left drug dealers knocked out or paralyzed on those boathouses from earlier combat, but then Fetch blows up these boathouses (presumable murdering the drug dealers trapped nearby) and then brags about how good of a person she now is. It's fucking hilarious how poorly separated the gameplay and story were in this situation, I'm sorry.
Infamous Second Son is all about "oh man, there's a police state coming!" and then immediately turns around and praises the war on drugs and views criminals as mild as drug dealers as non-human. If Fetch can be so easily "redeemed" in the eyes of the game despite being a mass murderer, then drug dealers can't be human. If drug dealers aren't human, then basically 80% of people in prison in America (who are drug dealers or worse) aren't human either. So Infamous Second Son starts out warning of a police state and then implicitly agrees that the people kept in prison are scum and that killing them wouldn't be that bad of a thing.
It's a game with such conflicted ideas that I have to laugh.
tl;dr: Infamous Second Son removes the series' great traversal and movement and replaces it with flying which is boring. It also fixes none of the series' problems and has bad powers and suffers from being a launch title. But the politics of the story are so dumb and contradictory that it becomes hilarious on inspection.
Note about thread title: Duterte is the new president of the Philippines. He has brought a reign of terror to his country by encouraging the murder of all suspected drug dealers and drug addicts.
