Of course, having 2 sets of dialogue depending on your choices would require effort.
Don’t worry, there isn’t. (But QD gets pretty darn close)
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it does need to be said that the Chinese at least here had the situation far more stabilized with barriers that prevent entity interference. At least until Aiden started smashing things. Additionally to their credit they also didn’t put the facility in the middle of a major city, so if things did go bad it’d at first only be the base.
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I like how, in this game in which every event is jumbled up as is, they decided to have a chapter which jumps around in time. I can’t tell if that’s awkwardly fitting or just entirely redundant.
Also god damn, Ryan manages to outdo himself in being garbage. I guess it’s good you can reject him, but I’d much rather not have the character who chooses the aftermath of a traumatic moment to confess his love to somebody he’s manipulated and hurt before, and then berates said person when she understandably rejects him.
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That entire section felt like a bond film.
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But one of the bad Connery movies.
It’s time for the FINAL UPDATE!!! 
24 - Black Sun
We’ve been at it for so long now, it’s time to see where this whole thing ends!!
(Make sure you sit through the credits to make sure you don’t miss anything!)
I’ll be making a more formal wrap-up post tomorrow, but don’t forget we’re ending this thread with the full stream playthrough on Saturday!
The time for the stream will be 12PM EDT!!
If you miss it, there’ll be a link to the VOD at the end of this thread before its closed.
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Well that was a clusterfuck of an ending.
The fact that they leave it on a sequel hook, Cage not doing sequels and Page being sick of his sick aside, is disgusting. How cocky do you have to be to leave a game like this on a cliffhanger ending, really?
At any rate, good LP! I quite enjoyed it, and it was fun seeing how awful this way. Excited to see the full stream playthrough if only because I am morbidly curious how the other things go (I’m conflicted towards encouraging you to get Ryan killed, or taking the Beyond ending where everyone except Ryan is dead).
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Well! That sure was the end of the game, if not necessarily an ending to the game! Let’s have a wall of spoiler text to talk about it.
I was so glad to see Cole make it to the end more or less okay, as I was fully expecting the game to notice the presence of melanin in his skin and ensure he ate it during the final bum rush. Granted, it looks like he potentially can if you aren’t careful, but the fact that his is a preventable death is way more than I was anticipating from…well, rather a lot of media, if we’re being honest. He’s so genuinely nice! I think him trying to get in touch with Jodie more as Nathan backslides further (he lost his blood family so it makes sense he’d take losing his surrogate kid pretty hard) was a missed chance for further character development, as while it’s true people do just vanish from people’s lives only to show up very different, it doesn’t really work for this game. Why not something cute like he and Jodie developing a secret code together to help her overcome feelings of a lack of privacy, which could show up later in the game as he tries to contact her? It could serve as some badly-needed nice things happening in Jodie’s life.
Going back to Nathan, Jodie’s final phone call to him is harsh, so even expanding on that could’ve helped bridge the gap between weird 'n cuddly Willem and “Dafoe is da foe, get it?” Willem. Did her rejecting him knock down a house of cards? When we see him show up at the ransacked police station he certainly could’ve dropped some dialogue along the lines of “We need to get her back. I need to get her back.” so we both view him uneasily throughout and get the feeling that he’s still all sorts of bonkers. If the reason he’s so relatively chill is because he gets to see the agonized faces of his wife and daughter (NATHAN WERE YOU EVEN LOOKING AT THEM WHILE THEY WERE THERE) then we need more about how that ghastly business centered him after he thought he lost everything. And would it have been so bad if his was another preventable death? Jeez. Dafoe clearly threw himself into the role, and he never ended up getting a millstone drilled to his leg before suffering severe trauma of the weiner, so it’s easier to appreciate his work here than in some of his more…challenging…fare. Antichrist, whatever did I do to you to make you so angry?
The ending might have worked if the game was willing to stick to its horror guns more closely, since a downer semi-cliffhanger works in that genre. As is it’s just a muddled mess, so Vault Dweller Cosplay Jodie comes off as silly and annoying rather than a cool reveal that can and will remind the player that Terminator 2 was a way better cinematic experience than this one. It’s like watching a dreary thriller that has the last four pages of a Junji Ito comic stapled to the end of the script.
Ultimately, the Aiden reveal just further makes me view him as a creep. Even with all the foreshadowing leading up to it it just felt lazy! Don’t be possessive of your sister, she is an autonomous being and also an alive person, she can make her own mistakes; unless we get a “choke out Ryan” minigame it’s hard to forgive things like “ruining a date because you’re jealous” and “communicating your presence only after your twin sister has done the nasty on a blanket.”
While I have prior engagements this weekend and can’t make the stream proper, I am very much looking forward to watching the VOD later (the Detroit one was a blast!) and have gotten quite a lot of entertainment value out of this LP, to the extent that I’ve eagerly recommended it to friends. Your presentation was equal parts funny and thoughtful, giving this game as much of a chance to wow us as is possible without ignoring details like the Unbearable Lightness of Ryan. Thank you for giving us all a chance to write entirely too many words about Beyond: Two Souls.
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Because we can’t let Jodie have a happy ending, here’s an apocalypse for her to deal with. I’m sure the cliff hanger was just a side effect of that.
I… I don’t know what I was expecting…
This entire end sequence is just an amalgamation of the game’s worst characteristics. Let’s take it from the top: Literally every single trope and cliche that wasn’t yet covered makes an appearance here, from the evil general that was only lacking a white cat as he delivered that “as we did with your mother (mr. Bond)” line, to Nathan going mad over the possibility of bringing his loved ones back(Including a “we transcended death” speech).
Furthermore, I don’t understand why Cage lacked the balls to make Ryan a mandatory romance option, almost all the scenes with him fall either flat or are extremely creepy. In fact, what is the point of having so many choices when almost all of them seemingly have similar results. Hell, the game is literally a step back from Heavy Rain in that when you fail… you just succeed anyway, in HR you at least could lose some characters.
I don’t wanna even comment on the suicide scene, I’ve never seen something handled this poorly in my entire life and I played Road to Hell: Retribution.
Finally, this game really needs to explain it’s shit. “Let us die Nathan”. YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD. He isn’t keeping you there, it’s presumably been quite a while between Jodie acting as a medium for them and Nathan constructing that machine. If they can “pass on”, they had plenty time to do so. In the same category, the ending “choice” makes no sense. Why are we stuck between 2 “worlds”? Why does Jodie survive? Cole even says that once they blow up the reactor the explosion is going to kill them, but for some reason Jodie gets to decide what will happen to her when she pulls the lever? I won’t even comment on the whole “apocalypse” tease.
There were hints of a cool game there, but man this is a disappointment.
With all that said, this LP was AMAZING. The commentary was spot on and I doubt I would’ve been able to solider on through this game alone, thanks for doing this!
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I just assumed that Nathan somehow found a way to find his family and trap them in that containment thing he had. Perhaps they were lingering behind because they were watching Nathan (even if they wanted him to move on), but now that he has them trapped, maybe the part that makes them visible is hurting them somehow.
Everything else you mention doesn’t make sense though.
[spoiler] So the various endings to this game rather irritated me. Particularly all the romantic endings, as most of them seem forced almost as much as Ryan is in the plot as an option. Seriously if David Cage wanted jodie to end up with his waifu Ryan so bad, i almost wish he had just had it mandatory.
The whole game’s story is a mess of potentially interesting plots that are not developed, and that would have done better being a focus instead just the next section. The whole thing with Ryan, could have done with far more screen time if we’re ever supposed to grow to care about him. In particularly alot of character development seems to happen almost spontaneously.
Not going to touch on the over use of evil CIA, and crazy general who made things worse by not letting go. All the negativity aside, i’m glad Cole made it because he was one of the few genuinely decent humans in the game. Also I know wish there was a game where the characters acted as a cleanup crew sent in by the military or some organization to contain and resolve situations like the black sun. Basically delta green staring someone like Jodie.
[/spoiler]
Anyone else think they missed a real opportunity in not giving Ryan a hook hand with the eyepatch?
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Okay, now let’s do a bit of a wrap-up for the thread in case you aren’t able to make the stream on Saturday:
First off, congrats to @LaZodiac for this incredibly early call about Aiden!!
Also, thanks to azzy for some JoJo-inspired fanart! That’s really cool!
It’s been quite a journey going through this game and with Detroit on the horizon (the game’s release, not an LP from me, god no!), it looks like Cage is going to get a ton more spotlight. I can’t imagine it’s going to go well… at all.
But!
Thanks to everyone who has followed this LP and everyone who finds it after the thread is closed. It’s been a ride but I’m glad for everyone who enjoyed it. I’m glad that this game sparked such dedicated discussion, either from everyone getting mad at Ryan or being confused as to why… everything, really.
Like I’ve said before, the stream will start at 12PM EST this Saturday, May 12th, and the VOD should go up by Sunday unless technical issues arise and it gets split up, in which case, I’ll handle it on my end in post. I’ll give the thread a few days and then it’ll close on Tuesday, the regular upload day because that feels appropriate.
If you want to keep up to date with anything LP-related or if you just want to chat, you can always find me on twitter, where I post when a new video drops, but mostly I lament playing this game. Or at least I did. Huh, looks like I’ll have to find something else to at least mildly complain about. Oh well…
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Well, that ending was a huge clusterfuck. It feels like Cage needed some big epic climax but couldn’t think of one, so he just decided to have Dafoe be Dafoe.
Thanks for the LP. I’ll try to make the stream.
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I’m at a loss for words here (and others have already said it better). As soon as Jodi medium’d up DaFoes damily a while back I figured that would come back by the end but WOW.
At any rate thanks for the LP.
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Its really kind of funny as you can see Dafoe almost do his green goblin kind of transformation stuff, while showing Jodie the souls of his dead family. Right about when he’s got the back towards the screen leaning over his desk.
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Oh shit that’s were I recognize him from. I literally saw that movie again like, two days ago, and I completely blanked on them being the same actor.
It’s ridiculous that no matter what you do Jodie can’t truly escape the generic hollywood romance and must kiss Ryan at some point and must always have to break up with him in any ending.
Also fuck Ryan for that 'i’ll wait as long as it takes" shit, you got dumped man please leave.
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From a friend I’ve heard that you can actually get Nathan to shoot Ryan for you before he kills himself, though I imagine his death scene is just as obnoxious.
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“Jodie before I die I just want you to know.
I kinda forgive you for the whole not making me dinner that one time. marry me.”
Okay so something I did like cause I don’t want to be super negative: I like that the canon ending was going to live with Zoe and the gang. Minus the whole end of the world hook thing.
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