The Walking Dead: The Final Season

после расставания я не проронил не слезинки, но на 4 эпизоде я плакал навзрыд, я никогда в жизни не плакал столько и не думаю что такое случится опять, теперь это моя любимая игра, спасибо tale tale за эту игру

After nearly 10 years since having played the first Walking Dead game by Telltale, I have finally gotten around to completing The Final Season. Naturally, because of these long gaps between games, my memory regarding the previous games has become hazy. So as a refresher, I went back to my reviews for the previous three games, and boy was I harsh. I believe my reviews for the second and third games still hold up, however the first game absolutely not. My biggest problem with that review, and all Walking Dead reviews I’ve written are the over-obsession with gameplay over story, very much a view I no longer have or stand by. Sure, I still think a game should prioritize gameplay over story, as video games are an interactive medium, but that doesn’t mean a game is automatically bad if they decide to focus on story. As I said in my Gris review, ultimately it does not matter whatever medium a creator chooses to tell their story as long as they are able to tell it. As such, with this new outlook I have, I realize I was far too harsh on this series of games in the past, and have really re-evaluated how I review games as a whole. Starting with this game, I will no longer give games arbitrary scores (although they were very fun to come up with some joke with them) as I feel that not only are they reductive to my overall experience to boil them down to a score, but also I find myself pitting games against each other, a mindset that I find exhausting and, again, reductive to the games I play. Now I will simply say if enjoyed or disliked a game. ANYWAYS! Enough with the lengthy forward. Let me actually get into the meat and potatoes of the review, and actually provide my two cents on The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series: The Final Season. (Thats a lot of ‘THE’s). Starting off with graphics/optimization, you know, the part nobody really cares about. When you first boot up the game, you are met with atrocious load times for some reason. Fortunately, these tend to iron themselves out over time. Other than that, there really isn’t much to say on this topic. It runs great, and the graphical fidelity has certainly had another bump up from the previous entry. However, on that subject of graphical fidelity, there is something I would like to nitpick. I’m not too fond of the artstyle the series has adopted. Character models of the main cast are incredibly detailed compared to the first game, but the environments and secondary/background characters have not received the same love, resulting in this inconsistent artstyle in the game, in my opinion. It was at it’s most apparent when one certain main character turns into a Zombie. That character looks so detailed next to the simplified Zombie NPCs that it is quite jarring. Additionally, there was the return of a character from the first game here, yet strangely I felt like they didn’t update her model enough to be more in line with new artstyle. Like, obviously they did update her a bit, but not to the level of the new cast. She stands out as well next to new characters. Naturally, they likely did this to keep her recognizable, but she was kind of a minor character in the first game, that I only remembered because the story had to spell it out for me anyway. Anyway, I felt the artstyle is inconsistent, or at least more so that the first two games. I did like the detail that far away objects/backgrounds will become more simplified in their colors, somewhat replicating the comics that inspired these games. I have a few more nitpicks, like how the animations are still a bit rough around the edges, some dialogue was a tad stilted/unnatural, and chapter one had some weird audio quality inconsistencies, but nothing too serious, or out of the ordinary for Telltale games (except the animations, I felt that they somehow got worse as the chapters went on?). Before I get into the core aspect (the writing), I would like to take a little detour into the subject I was historically way too harsh on; the gameplay. This game is by far Telltale’s most interactive game yet. With collectibles, full 3D movement, free aiming and shooting, and an abundance of the tried and true quick-time events, you can rarely remove your hands from the keyboard/controller. Of course, it’s no first-person shooter or action RPG, but it never intended to be, and that’s OK (screw you, stupid past me). What this game, and all of Telltale’s games aim to be are involved stories with complex characters, and arcs. So, how did this game fair in that regard? Better than Season Three, worse than Season One. I’d say about on par with Season Two. And, a reminder from the foreward, I have not played Seasons One and Two since 2018, so my memory on those are fuzzy, but the fact that Season One’s story has still stuck with me after all these years, whereas I cannot remember a single character from Season Two other than Luke speaks volumes to me. I felt the story in the Final Season was a bit, meandering. Like not much of importance happened and felt kind of slow overall. Not to mention we didn’t really adventure much beyond the school and it’s immediate surroundings. The new cast of characters are mostly charming, well voice-acted, and have set personalities and morals that make them feel genuine. All but the main antagonists of the game. I can’t really speak of them without getting into spoilers since, as I mentioned before, the main antagonist is a returning character from Season One, and a major secondary antagonist is a somewhat twist within this game’s story. Let me just say, the main antagonist had a lot of potential given, but I felt it was mostly left unexplored in favor of a kind of generic vengeance plot. It’s weird to me we focus a lot more on her relationship with Clementine (who was 9 in the first season and likely would barely even remember her), than the obvious parallels between her and AJ (the second protagonist next to Clementine). As for the secondary antagonist, I really don’t understand what the writers wanted to do with her. The story kept flip-flopping between sympathetic, and detestable. She felt like a walking contradiction, only there to pad out the games villains, and provide a modicum of complexity to the secondary character of Tennessee. Overall, I think the story was good, not great. I loved the parallels to the first game. The references to events we experienced, the name drops, even the same music and camera angles in scenes in homage to the first game. But by far my favorite callback was the dream sequence in Chapter 3. It was the first time I wept that hard playing a game since the first Walking Dead game. It was magical. Of course, it is not without it’s problems. No piece of art ever truly is. For instance, I don’t like how Seasons Two and Three are almost completely neglected in this game, with almost no references to events or characters from those games, thus making this feel incomplete as a FINAL Season. Additionally, some dialogue options were vague, and resulted in either dialogue that either didn’t feel to match the intention behind the prompt, or lead to narrative changes that felt like a leap from the logical. All of this said, I enjoyed it more than Season Three, and likely more than Season Two, but I cannot recall. I kind of would like to go back and play the first two games now.