3/5 ★ – JimboHarman's review of Red Dead Redemption.

This one’s overrated. Not that I don’t like it, the dialogue is sharp, the open world has plenty to do, I love the stranger missions, the music, and the shooting feels great, but the story is just so repetitive. John Marston will do literally anything for anybody who claims to know where Bill Williamson is, it got to the point where it started to undermine his character. Literally every conversation he has with a mission giver consists of him threatening to shoot them if they keep taking advantage of him, only to do whatever they say. He will cross any moral line to help a stupid drunkard, or literal tyrant but he stops shy at actually following through on any of his threats. He would come across far more competent, and compelling if he’d actually just twist someone’s arm for once, shoot Irish in the leg, hell, torture him until he actually gives out something useful. It also doesn’t help that John’s relationships don’t evolve over the course of the narrative. There are some compelling characters, like Bonnie, Jack and Abigail, who you learn more about as you spend more time with them, and as a result, grow closer to, but you spend the majority of your time with caricaturish fools who don’t change, and who don’t inspire any change in John. I seriously don’t understand why John spends so much time helping most of these people, sure, I can buy that he’d feel compelled to help Bonnie, Agent Ross and his family, but what keeps bringing him back to literally everyone else? Again, if his bite was half as bad as his bark, this game would last about two hours. It always baffles me that this is lauded as one of the best video game narratives ever written, when the majority of the missions consist of you listening to some idiot talk absolute nonsense until you’ve arrived at whatever establishment you’ve been tasked with shooting up. To the game’s credit, this is definitely a deliberate parallel to the way Agent Ross and the US Government use John, and lots of the characters tie into the theme of change at the core of the Red Dead series. It’s motivated, thought has been put into the story, but that doesn’t make it compelling. Compare this to Red Dead 2, where every member of the gang feels like an actual human with more backstory than most video game protagonists, who all evolve based on what bit of the game you’re at, and the issue should be clear. Now imagine Red Dead 2 if every character was Uncle. You don’t have to. That’s just Red Dead 1. Ziiiiiiiiing!