exxwhyzed's review of Red Dead Redemption II.

I think it's very difficult for me to simply assign a number to Red Dead Redemption 2. Sometimes this game is the best I've ever played, but other times the game fails to live up to this weighty title. The highs are unbelievably high, with moments that make me appreciate this game and the medium in general as a work of art. Unfortunately, videogames as interactive art pieces require interaction, and I subscribe to the idea that that interaction should be fun. It's a game, after all. This isn't to say that the game isn't fun, but there are points where the game makes me roll my eyes, especially near the end. I want to start with some good things. The characters in this game are fleshed out with personality, stories, and around "eight feet" of dialogue. As in... if you printed it all out and stacked it high, it would be tower over everyone. This figure includes all of the main and side missions and random quips from main characters, side characters and random NPCs that you meet once. There is so much organic dialogue in this game that changes based on the situation as well as playing off your current condition. If I were to play the game a second or third there's no doubt in my mind that I would find more things that these characters have to talk about even during the fourth time through, and I'm not only talking about throwaway lines about the quality of Arthur's beard either. I've skimmed through several playthroughs and found real, substantial full conversations that I never had the opportunity to listen to, and I'm sure there are many more. One of my favorite parts of the game was during downtime around the camp. A few times during the game the gang throws celebrations for jobs well done or special occasions, and it was during the first of these events that I realized that these characters are written so thoroughly that they feel alive and by extension they make the camp itself feel alive. This effect extends to the setting as a whole, making the entire game feel more than the standard empty open-world backdrop. The game gives you the option to skip these sections, but if you don't you'd find yourself sitting around the campfire listening to the conversations that start up between the members just before someone grabs a guitar and starts an impromptu singalong. The interactions here pull me back to memories of bullshitting around with my friends at 2am in a goodwill parking lot. That is to say it feels very real, and I love it. The trio of Arthur, Dutch and Hosea play like a squad of brothers, with Hosea being the eldest voice of reason, Dutch being the ambitious middle child, and Arthur heading up the rear as the heart of the group. In this analogy Arthur also exists as the closest in "age" to most of the younger members of the gang in such a way that it feels like he's connected to them just a bit more than they would be to Dutch or Hosea, even if in the end it is Dutch calling the shots. If Dutch is the head of the gang, than Arthur is the backbone. Many if not most of the members rely on Arthur's commitment to the gang to help them out of tough binds or to complete tasks in a way that they cannot rely on Dutch for, since he's too busy with the "big picture." Dutch's development during the game was a treat to see and digest, and I won't get too far into it here because it's kind of a spoiler, but I will say that he is a very dynamic character whose personal story and tribulations are extreme high points of the game itself. It's wonderful to see such a pointed sub-narrative within one character that has a grand effect on the story at large. Hosea is constantly at the heels of both Arthur and Dutch, trying his best to keep the two of them in line. Make no mistake, he is a criminal just like the rest of them, but his plans have more than ten second of rational thought behind them, and typically are carried out to cause the least amount of harm and death possible. The reason the gang is on the run in the first place is because while Hosea was working on a safe, well planned job for the gang to pull off with minimal risk, Micha and Dutch pulled a hasty train job that ended in a massive shootout, killed several innocent people, and put a giant target on the backs of everyone involved. Hosea is the rational head of this King Ghidorah, and he does his absolute best to keep the kaiju pointed in the right direction. Every mission that has meaningful impact hits like a truck, and the emotional beats that follow are heavy. In contrast, several missions end on a triumphant note, and I felt real pride and celebration from the resulting celebrations I'd mentioned earlier. The issue with this game, specifically towards the second half, is that these moments become much more sparse. The game spends an agonizing amount of time poking and prodding at the thought of a conclusion that never comes, and left me fatigued after playing for such a long time. Then suddenly there's a big turning point, and in an effort to avoid spoilers I won't mention what exactly happens, but I will say that it doesn't fit with the rest of the game at all. This specific section of the game could, and should have been cut entirely, and the ending chapters should have been expedited because the ending itself was pretty good. It was an emotional climax to all of the setup that had dragged on unnecessarily over the course of several missions that all began to play out the exact same: talk to a guy, ride your horse to the other side of the map, do a thing involving a game mechanic that has never shown up before nor will ever show up again, it's an ambush, shoot some guys, horse chase, and then go home (home is on the other side of the map again by the way). This problem only seemed to pop up towards the second half of the game, or perhaps it always existed, but I only recognized it when the honeymoon phase wore off. During the first half of the game I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff to do from minigames to random encounters, side quests, distractions, exploration, hunting and everything in between, and exploring everything the game had to offer cushioned the reality that this game suffers from abysmal pacing, tedium from homogenous level design, and unnecessary "mechanics" that are as temporary as they are useless. The best parts of this game are spent running around the open world just doing things and engaging with every part of it that's been and crafted to be an incredible realistic depiction of the western frontier. I personally am no longer impressed by hyper realism as an art style, but I am impressed by realism as a function of the game. I am of the school of thought that videogames aren't intended to be real, they're supposed to be fun. The thing I'm impressed by this game is not that the horse's balls shrink in the cold, or that I can count the individual hairs on Arthur Morgan's beard. I'm impressed by the sound design of the animals, and the actual views of the open world. I'm impressed by the layout of the buildings, and how the little details and mannerisms of the people that inhabit the cities and towns make it feel like a real place. Realism to me only needs to be taken as far as it's required to make me feel something. Anything beyond that is no longer impressive. I loved how cinematic this game gets as an extension of its style. The delivery of the story and the spectacle of it all make the entire game feel like a movie, but unfortunately this is also where the game falls flat on its face for me. There are many times where in order to deliver the necessary dialogue and cinematic elements, the game forces you into an extended horse ride where nothing of note, save for dialogue, happens. This is good until it becomes grating. As I've said, the pacing falls off during the second half, because they introduce a lot of new branching paths that have to get resolved immediately instead of tying up the things we've come to understand. (Although, in a way this unraveling of the pace paints a good metaphor, but I digress... it's still not fun.) At this point, the horse rides are covered with dialogue that I haven't had much time to care about, and they turn into a mandatory cutscene that occasionally gets interrupted because the built in cinematic mode drives your horse into another horse, which starts a gunfight. Specifically, I recall a moment where the mission took me directly into a static encounter with a pack of wolves. My horse bucked me off, and the wolves tore my throat out and I died immediately. The respawn had me doing the entire horse ride over again, so I closed the game and started playing Balatro instead. This brings up another pitfall of the game: lack of reliable fast travel. It would be easy to toss this complaint away if the various systems worked all the time, but unfortunately there was more than one occasion where none of the three available methods of fast travel were able to be used, forcing me to take the long journey on horseback, which is fun the first time, but by the fourth time it's not so great. This means that the ride to get to the point where I would be playing the game was mostly spent engaging cinematic mode, and turning on a youtube video while I wait for the five minutes it takes to traverse the massive map. That said, when I eventually get to the real game of the game, the shootouts are incredible. Red Dead makes playing a cowboy feel incredibly good. I'm a big fan of the cowboy aesthetic, so during the shootout sections I'm playing out my fantasy of being a wild west deadeye shooter. The deadeye system is incredible and plays into the cinematic direction with the inspired feeling of the classic line 'em up and knock 'em down you'd see from quickdraw cowboys in the movies. The guns are powerful and you can be a quickdraw shot, play with long guns, or just blast everyone away with shotguns. Horse chases are tense and energetic, with your movement taken care of in sections that turn the game into an on-rails shooter that demands your focus and attention as enemies ride out from the trees from every angle. These are the moments that I lived for in the game. These were the moments that kept me going, because to be honest, if it weren't for the combat, sunk cost, and want for an eventual payoff, I would have dropped the game after picking it back up earlier this year. Like I said, it's really difficult to summarize how I feel about this game in a simple number. The highs soar beyond the clouds that give incredible views of the game's low points that slog through the troughs of dull tedious busy work, and random mechanics that appear exactly one time and never again instead of being simplified, or made into cutscenes. The first half of Red Dead Redemption was one of the best games I've ever played while the second half overstayed its welcome, and dragged along forcing me to ask: how much longer am I going to have to play this game until its over? The writing in this game is up there in the hall of fame as being one of the best written stories I've ever experienced in any medium. Every solid conversation and meaningful interaction in this game pays for itself the world over, and justifies the work and annoyance it took to get there. And with statements like that it's no wonder that the nuance of my feelings towards this game are too complex to boil down into a simple number, so I'll give it two. First Half: 5/5 Second Half: 3/5