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So do we care about spoilers or not? Whatever, spoiling it all. So just to jump in here, gently caress both those guys at the end. I didn't think Kenny was all that stable since Season 1 (even though my Lee did basically reconcile with him while in the attic), much less everything in Season 2, but I'm not going along with someone who either forces me to kill someone or let someone else kill them. Okay sure, Clem walks off into a blizzard with no food, water, shelter, heat, and somehow end up in a sunny and warm field with a somehow still alive baby, but I'll choose to believe that is the magic of plot and not a hallucination as she lies freezing to death face down in a snowbank  Honestly if I have a problem with Season 2, and this is going to sound really stupid, but a lot of death just sort of... happens? Many of the characters' deaths in Season 2 just stopped having as much as an impact as in Season 1. Alvin barely gets established as a character across 3 episodes, vanishing for most of his final one, and then dies. Carlos takes a random bullet and dies, Sarita gets bit and dies, Sarah falls and dies, Rebecca dies from childbirth (presumably at least, they could have seriously at least mentioned something, surely someone noticed heavy bleeding), Luke breaks through the ice and dies, and while not a death Mike/Bonnie/Arvo just vanish. There just seemed to be too many characters for TellTale to adequately build them up for a satisfactory conclusion like in Season 1. I mean, I get that they were basically events designed to harden Clem the gently caress up but by the time Sarah just gets eaten I could only think "Oh, hey another main character died, how shocking  " While they weren't deaths just for shock value, mostly, so many of them happened one after the other (yes, I did play episodes 3-5 separated by only a few days) and were just over in an instant that it was fairly difficult to just care for the latest one by the end.Still, I think most of the season hit well. TellTale didn't just try and repeat the emotional beats from the first game and went in a direction I wasn't expecting at all that wasn't entirely unpleasant. Okay it was entirely unpleasant but you know what I mean. Though I guess with three completely different endings in three completely different areas unless TellTale establishes a canon or does some major retconning Season 2 is the final game starring Clementine. Which is a shame because Clem is the best.
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Sep 11, 2014 11:43
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BMS posted:I felt that was another missed opportunity in Season 2. In the first Episode Clementine had a number of dialogue choices that you could pick from that made her come across as manipulative as gently caress, such as threatening Alvin to tell the group if he didn't help her, or threatening Rebecca with telling the group that the baby might not be Alvin's if she didn't start acting nicer to her, which I think would have been interesting to play the entire season that way. It would have been more believable too, that this 11-12 year old girl, who's been hardened through dealing with close to 2 years of this poo poo and seen more than most with her adventures with Lee, is manipulating the group to go along with what she wants, instead of them just being so incompetent that they follow her/let the child make the big decisions for them. At least have that as an option if you wanted to play as a darker Clem. But instead it seemed to me that aside from a few choices, the "dark" options really fizzled after Episode 1. This relates to another things I thought of overnight. The dialogue choices for Clem seemed to not have nearly as much forethought put into it as Season 1. It could just be that I didn't "agree" with Season 2 as much as Season 1 but Season 1 rarely left me wanting for the response that I was reaching for, either from a game perspective or a sort of role-playing one. I could be looking at the first game too favourably but I've always seen the first few lines you can say to the cop as the basic outlines of the character traits TellTale had in mind for Lee and they maintained those consistently throughout Season 1. In Season 2 there's an option near the end of first episode when you're talking with Luke and you can tell him about what happened to Lee. My Clem shot Lee before he turned and I responded with the option to explain as such. Season 2 managed to make me retroactively feel like a monster for doing that because the line you get for that basically seems to be Clem convincing herself that she had no choice as a way to battle the guilt she felt. Combine that with what happened to Omid right at the start and I basically saw Clem as someone who was racked with guilt. Considering the game just managed to make me feel guilty I thought this was a pretty good direction to try and take but by the end of Season 2 you only ever get a few generic "It's my fault" lines for only a few situations that don't really go anywhere or contribute meaningfully to the character even though with a bit of more writing they could be given that kind of feeling. Whether you wanted Lee to be someone with 0 regrets over what he did before the game started and who quickly able to adapt a kill-or-be-killed attitude, someone who thought he committed an unforgivable crime but given an opportunity to not fix it but maybe make up for it in some way, or something in between those extremes there seemed to be something for you. Clem doesn't seem to be afforded many inward looking moments as Lee was in Season 1. So much of her dialogue seems to be about trying to control the situation in front of her right that moment and not reflecting on how her response is going to affect someone, perhaps because she's an 11 year old talking to adults. But from a more personal perspective it seems fairly difficult to put together consistent dialogue about either what you, the player, is feeling or what Clem might be feeling. Instead a lot of the time it's just a matter of deciding if you agree or disagree with out of whoever is throwing ideas around. It still works but it just makes the game less about building Clem's character and more about just trying to survive and I was expecting more of the former. Boy, that's a lot of words about fictional 11 year old girl.
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Sep 11, 2014 16:36
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Wheezle posted:Do we know if there's going to be a season 3? We do. (yes)
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Sep 14, 2014 05:30
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Junkfist posted:Clementine will use one for AJ and one for herself at the start of S3 before Arvo becomes the main character. Every dialogue option is mumble-y insulting everyone around you in Russian while planning their doom.
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Sep 16, 2014 18:09
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GuyDudeBroMan posted:Just beat this and was surprised to see that only 8% of players decided to try and go with Mike and Bonnie when they were stealing the truck and leaving If the scene was Bonnie and Mike waking Clem up in the early hours to leave quietly then I'd think you would have seen a higher number. But wanting to skip town with all the loving food and Arvo? gently caress those guys.
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Sep 26, 2014 15:55
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Dolash posted:Started replaying from season 1 recently and it's such crazy whiplash. Those first couple of episodes feel incredibly different - the characters act a lot more like regular people undergoing a temporary crisis rather than the ground-down, PTSD'd survivors we come to know by the end. Kenny at the start is practically jovial and easygoing. Things are also a fair bit more adventure-game-y, with more puzzles and exploration, which works for creating calmer scenes rather than a constant flow of conversations and crises. I could be way off the mark on this but I've come to think the reason Season 2 didn't work quite as well as Season 1 is because Season 2 basically became like every other piece of zombie media, too focused on providing horrible and shocking situations to react to. Season 1 of course had more than its fair share of tragedy and terribleness to react to but pretty much all of that reaction was framed with Lee's relationship with Clem in mind. To have a game, even a zombie apocalypse one, to be so focused on raising a child (even if its skipping everything outside a very short time period) is pretty unique. In Season 2 the framing seemed to be just "What kind of horrible poo poo can happen to an 11 year old girl." I think TellTale have said that they were basically trying to have Clem go through the whole "You have to make those decisions that allow you to survive" thing but the "problem" is that is what every other piece of zombie fiction does and even in the best of that fiction its really hard to make those situations come off as anything but contrived. I had this feeling especially through Chapters 4 and 5 when characters just started dying out of nowhere. By the time Sarah got eaten I was already feeling numb to it as I realized "Oh, we're in this part of a zombie story." Season 2 still worked better than that other media, for the most part, but still suffered from a lot of the same situations that I at least have seen so many times before. I'd love to approach it as a fresh face to the apocalypse genre but I can't. Coolguye posted:They've already said they're doing a 3rd season, and Clementine is the MC again. I'd like to know if you can confirm this as well because I've only ever heard "We're working on a Season 3" too.
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Sep 28, 2014 19:03
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Kraps posted:I wonder if they could do something like the suicide mission from ME2 or if that would require a much longer and involved story From what I've read that was a nightmare for Bioware to get working properly. TellTale built an engine that periodically erased or ignored saved games.
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Oct 1, 2014 19:04
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The Bee posted:Oh yeah, I'll agree to that a ton. The Season 2 survivors did little more than bungle around and gently caress everything up, and with the story never having time to sit down and develop anybody we never really had reason to like them or not. And while I personally think Kenny got a bit too dangerous or rash at times in both Season 1 and Season 2, at least in Season 1 it was usually his own fault. Season 2 just threw the poor guy headfirst into a ton of other peoples' problems. By Episode 5 what I was waiting for was the equivalent to the attic scene in Season 1. I guess that was supposed to be the bit in the fenced off power station and while that was generally a good part taken in a vacuum it ultimately didn't go anywhere or seem to mean anything afterwards. I mean I suppose Kenny would have gone and pointlessly defended Ben no matter what Lee said to him in the attic but telling Kenny that Ben wanted Lee to drop him back in Crawford certainly felt like it mattered in that moment. The only thing the power station in Season 2 seemed to highlight by the end is that those people had to literally force themselves not to quarrel about anything for a single night.
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Oct 6, 2014 05:39
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AlliedBiscuit posted:I loved season 1. I started playing season 2 a few months ago. Right off the bat, Omid does, and not much later, you get attached to this friendly dog only to be forced to kill him. I still haven't gone back after that. Somehow that was all just too much for me. Is the rest of season 2 as horribly depressing as this? I could handle season 1 but maybe the bleakness has become too much for me. The whole time with the dog, I felt sorry for it, and was hoping out loud the entire time: "please don't kill the dog", and then not only do they kill it, but they force the player to do it. The game most definitely continues to kick you while you're down throughout the whole playtime, yes.
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Nov 4, 2014 04:17
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monster on a stick posted:Regardless of what Sean/Jake said, I would have expected a little more impact from playing 400 Days other than a few cameos. And that's why Clem alone is the better ending  Not only because its different but because everyone but her is clearly crazy and its just "gently caress this poo poo, I'm out."
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Dec 8, 2014 17:32
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Endorph posted:Yeah, but then why make his motivations tied to a choice if you weren't going to make that choice actually affect his motivations? I know I'm being annoyingly meta about The Stranger when I say this but his entire purpose beyond kidnapping Clementine wasn't a really narrative one but a way to simply get the player to ask themselves "why." He is always going to hate you for whatever happened and nothing will ever change that. But even so that whole section forms a very important element of the first game, forcing the player to stop, think, and reflect on what they did and why they did it. The point is to not convince The Stranger of anything but to justify it to yourself. Though I do admit that the conversation becomes much more interesting if you made more of the morally grey choices like taking the food.
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Dec 9, 2014 00:18
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general chaos posted:My only guess is the player choice data led Telltale to believe that players would pick Kenny over Luke by a landslide. Replace Luke with a more popular character and insert a few more out-of-character actions by Kenny and you end up with a nice argument causing split as sides war over who the right choice was. I still think a bunch of adults acting like high schoolers in the lunch room because a 12 year old decided to sit with one person over another is really hilarious.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:00
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Bass Bottles posted:Just finished season 2 and I'm sort of unhappy with my ending, but it also pretty much reflects the choices I made. I shot Kenny because Jane and everyone convinced me he was unhinged and dangerous, but when it turned out Jane had put the baby in danger to make Kenny look bad I didn't have the guts to tell her to get lost (though I didn't forgive her, I stayed silent.) My Clementine played it safe and always tried to please everyone, only taking sides when forced to, so she got the most boring, uncertain ending. I imagine the real problem with continuing with Clementine is that season 2 can end with 1 of 3 fairly different endings that all seem fairly important taken individually. You'd basically have to invalidate a pretty important part of the second game to build a third part of of the second.
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Dec 10, 2014 02:23
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I don't know about having AJ still be around 100% being a bad thing. Regardless of what they would do with the ending if they time jump a few years, skip that whole problem of "How the gently caress did you even feed that baby?" and have Clem as a teenager trying to raise AJ as a 4 or 5 year old now, mostly alone in a hostile world, and you might get some interesting themes and writing out of that. Motherhood isn't exactly a common thing in video games (zombies as a single mother metaphor!). Clem herself was, what, 8 years old in Season 1? 9 by the end? I know they have different writers now but having a good child character at least has some precedent in The Walking Dead game. It would likely not be interesting given some of the writing in Season 2 and prone to terrible save-the-kid QTE's but maybe I can at least think of good possibilities? Probably not. It would probably be terrible.
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Dec 11, 2014 01:50
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Part of the problem seems to be how they juggled the characters in light of their ending. Rumours of a rewrite aside the ending of Kenny vs Jane with Clem caught in the middle was probably in their mind for a while but by the end of episode 3 barely any one in the main group had died. Correct me if I'm wrong but of the main group only Alvin, potentially Nick, and Pete can die before the end of episode 3? Besides having a smaller core group to begin with, by the end of episode 3 of the first game Larry is dead, Lily is gone/dead, Duck and Katjaa are dead, both Doug and Carley are dead. Not that characters should be killed off quicker just to make the writing easier but the deaths in the first game were utilized in the narrative and gameplay much better prior to and after their exit. But since the ending they had for Season 2 was Clem alone with Kenny and Jane over the course of just 2 episodes they had to remove Nick (potentially), Sarah, Rebecca, Luke, Mike, Carlos, Sarita, and Bonnie. There just isn't enough meat left in the game to give that many characters a meaningful out of the story, by death or otherwise especially since you can't give them nearly as much character as the smaller core group of the first game over the previous episodes since over half the first episode is really just Clementine. Kibayasu fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Jan 6, 2015 |
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Jan 6, 2015 05:33
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Rabbit Hill posted:Just dropping into this thread to ask if Season One had a thread here? If I wasn't a bitter, cynical, and socially maladjusted man-child I definitely would have cried at the end. Season 1 did have a thread but if you're asking if its kosher to talk about Season 1 in the Season 2 thread I think that's fine for such a narrative and character driven game.
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Jan 26, 2015 17:49
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Rabbit Hill posted:(Uh, I seem to have left an entire phrase out of my second sentence -- "and I was wondering if everybody...") No (same with Doug) and to my knowledge the arm does cause one difference in the scene with the Stranger but not to the ultimate ending.
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Jan 26, 2015 18:17
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Max posted:I think the biggest thing you might lose, depending on the RNG, is what you had Clem do to Lee at the end of Season 1. Otherwise, you're not missing much. I feel like I'm spoiling something but all I'm saying is something the game doesn't do so I guess I'm not but even that doesn't matter much past the first episode. I suppose there is that scene in the first episode of Season 2 when you can tell Luke what happened and pick from an appropriately guilt-ridden list of option, especially if Clem shot Lee ("I had to. ...I had to.") but it just doesn't come to mean much after that..
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Feb 11, 2015 00:20
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