I should have known better, as the whole cowboy genre is terrible as fuck. Westerns (as boomer Americans call the genre) have the slowest dialogue, the corniest patriarchal story-line, and are obviously filled with a heap ton of other problematic bits. Of course, I had to try as the game got great reviews. I thought I'd try it with the Steam summer sale.
Fuckkkkkkkk the long boring ass cut scenes. OMG pls talk faster and have dialogue that's interesting. The beginning of the game is just 30 minutes of video and riding your horse so slowly through the snow. I thought that my TikTok brain couldn't stand some old slow game from a bygone era, but I'm checking this shit and it was released in 2018!
If I was some prat who loved the mythology of the "settling of the west", a game with a white dude on a horse on a mountain would get me hard. Why can't more games be like Atomic Heart? I wanna defend the land of Stalin and have cut scenes with good dialogue a talking glove that debates theory and a sexy refrigerator that probably wants to murder me.
i liked it, but i didn't even touch the previous games, so i lacked a lot of context. I wanted to like red dead online a lot better, being able to play as a lady was really cool - the character creator was robust enough that I made someone who looked like a genuine ancestor to me, and that was cool, if only because one side of my family genuinely went west in the 19th century but managed to be as unproblematic in deed as was possible for a white person, and it was cool to larp that experience.
but the main game is like.... "i'm an old man now" subgenre of Thing, like the God of War games - that shit sucks - and it's also like, broadly about the closing of the frontier, which could've been interesting, but because it's such a direct parallel of the "i'm an old man now" subgenre, just for worldbuilding, it's pretty much only cool if you have some kind of ability to relate to that, and are comfortable doing so.
personally i'm a really gay trans woman, so it's hard to wanna pick that shit up and finish it because aside from the janky and micro-transaction-expensive online portion of the game, there's nothing in this game for me.
The first game doesn't bear much on the second. Many of the characters show up against but they're much shallower and you get vastly less time with them. Rdr2 has much better writing and much deeper characterization and much more focus on the characters. The very first game, read dead revenge, has nothing in common except being set in a fanatsy version of "the west".
Re; i'm an old man now, totes agree, it's got a lot of "white man's boredom" going on. both games are about the closing of the west, and John and Arthur's stories both parallel that as each of them is seeing their way of life end as America completes it's conquest of the west. Arthur contemplating what his life has amounted to, and struggling to reconcile the violence he's done with the ideals he wants to believe in, is a stand in for America struggling to reckon with the disconnect between it's mythology and the actual horrors it committed. John, Dutch, and Josiah have a weird maiden mother crone thing going for Arthur in that they represent a better past, a destabilizing presence, and some kind of hope for a future.
You never get much perspective from the women in the group, and while the game does try to give perspective from various subaltern groups there can be a long time between those moments and a lot of Dutch ranting and Arthur being sad. Sadie is pretty cool, though. From "oh no my husband and my life" to "murder is cool and i like wearing pants"
Good point. I'm really not into this boomer "why isn't the world made for me anymore" trope.