And so it goes.
Zodi Plays: Dishonored [31] [FINALE] A Great Age Ending
Video Length: 42:28
We make our way to Kingsparrow Island, to clambour our way up to the top of the lighthouse to beat up a jerk and save our daughter. It couldn’t be any simpler than that, and yet… there’s a lot going on in this one. It’s a bright sunny day, the guards are up to their job as always, and we need to sneak our way in. We have every tool we need, all we need provide is the skill to execute it. And so we do. Havelock and his droogs feared that if we did turn on them we’d be unstoppable. It’s time to show them they were right.
From a mechanical and story standpoint I love this final area. It’s kind of a culmination of everything, and at least on the path I took involves basically using a little bit of everything we have to get through it. I am, in a sense, thrilled with how GOOD I seem to be in this one. Doing risky and dangerous plays with confidence and acumen. It’s quite cool. The level is set up so there’s clearly a ton of paths to the top, and it feels a such. Story wise it’s the final bastion, the final holdout. It’s a really impressive place, a fortified light house which doesn’t seem like it’d be all that defensible, but then you realize it’s a very tall building with exactly one way up it. Not a lot of ways to climb an entire lighthouse, after all. But we’ve cracked every defense so far.
And at the top… well, we see something that I find very silly. It makes some degree of sense, and writing wise it’s actually good, but as I mentioned previously this is just too much explanation. Havelock being a fool who wanted to manipulate Emily makes sense. Corvo will always protect her, can’t puppet the government when someone who can cut strings is there. But not only does Havelock have that, he also has “if the world sees the bad we did, they will turn on us” which is… not how this works and doesn’t super gel with everything else. There’s also the idea that nobles are supposed to be seen as noble, a thing from the real world where the nobility seek to appear as pure and pristine as the title suggests. I can understand that, not wanting to be seen having dirtied their hands… but again, that’s not how that works. And I feel one could safely argue that doing all this skulduggery to save the country from someone who murdered the queen and infested the city with plague rats is um… a good thing? And then they also add on what we see here; the melancholy of Admiral Havelock. Doubting himself, doubting his sure-foot actions. It feels excessive. As does uh, killing the other co-conspirators. Welp. But yeah, this is my main issue with the writing in the game. Havelock having a multitude of reasons is too much, for one specific reason. If we kept it with the “he got power hungry and Corvo will stop him from manipulating Emily” then that’s all well and good. Still clearly a mistake, but reasonable. But adding all the other reasons makes the first motive weaker, because it all continues to brush up on “Corvo literally took over the entire country for you in less than a week”. Every additional reason added to the pile makes Corvo’s stance more complex as well… and in a straight fight of logic, all of Havelock’s paranoia and overthinking adds up to “don’t do a traitor Corvo will fucking murder you”. So if they had kept it simple, there wouldn’t be as much thinking directed towards his reasoning, thus not piling on how traitoring us is the worst idea imaginable.
To put it bluntly; Havelock deserves what he gets. The co-conspirators do too of course, but Havelock most of all bought his ticket videos ago. And with Havelock gone… we can finally save Emily. Happy end.
And like I said above… so it goes. We have completed Dishonored, and I can say definitively that this game RULES. I loved doing this, loved my experience as a blind player, and very much enjoyed basically every part of this game. It kinda drags a bit around the Daud part, the ending taking a bit too long to ramp up to Kingsparrow Island, but it works. As has been discussed I find Havelock’s many reasons for doing a traitor to be excessive, sometimes less is more in a situation like this. I found it… rather cool that this is how they chose to end the game, though I do second the opinion that being as non-lethal as me should have prooobably ended at the bar scene. This is of course another reason why less is more at times as said above. Ah well, it’s fine. Like, this is my only writing complaint in the game and it’s honestly kind of a small one. Gameplay wise it did feel like sometimes the game just… didn’t work properly, but given what the game was trying to do overall that’s kind of one of those reasonable “yeah I get that” situations. Sometimes your massive overlapping systems brush up poorly against each other. It happens. Mechanically though the game plays pretty much perfect, it just needs some more non-lethal options.
So yeah. That was Dishonored. Thank you all very much for watching. I loved playing it, and I hope you all enjoyed. Thanks to my supporters on Patreon, and thanks to those who watch at all. We’ve been through a lot here, and I’m glad to see you stick with me to the end. I’m going to take a week long break to relax. And this time an ACTUAL week. So join me next time, on November 11th… for The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks. Oh booooy.