I don't have much of substance to say this time around. That's a sure sign of the summer, don't you think? No, really, this is just a mix of laziness and lack of things to say. The one thing I could actually talk about is Assassin's Creed II, but as I said, I'm feeling lazy (and tired, too, really) so I'm saving that for later. I'm still working my way through Final Fantasy XIII. I'm actually up to Chapter 11 out of thirteen chapters. This also happens to be the grind-tastic portion of the game, so this might take a while. I'm hoping to get through the game over the next week, or at the very least get done grinding.
So what do I have to blither about? I finally managed to man up and finish Modern Warfare 2's single player campaign. I adamantly can't be bothered to touch the multiplayer, 'cause we all know what it's like. However, the campaign's finale raised some... particular feelings. As an overall experience the game simply failed to make any sort of impression. Fairly impressive and well-crafted military action rolled past my eyes but at very few points did I manage to get into it in any way at all. Some of the tighter moments I could almost connect with, mostly because I just didn't want to die again.
A little warning here. The rest of this post will be spent discussing the late-mid to final moments of Modern Warfare 2, so if you for some odd reason really don't want to spoil yourself the fabulous ending of Modern Warfare 2, stop reading now. And get help. You have issues. Furthermore, this will be ranting. Well thought-out, interesting ranting, yes, but ranting nonetheless. You have been warned.
Seeing as I'd already played the game a little past the midway point, I returned to the game just in time for the bad stuff to begin. You see, the bullshit starts piling up at this point. There are two main sources of utter, complete bullshit. The first Modern Warfare had a rather thrilling moment where your character died for real. This was rather fresh in the world of western entertainment, where heroes very, very rarely die despite most of dramatic tension being built around them being in mortal jeopardy.
Now, MW2 pulls this two times. That didn't annoy me half as much as the amount of times MW2 pulls this halfway. "You Just Almost Died" happens constantly, and means either that the screen temporarily goes black or the game plays the same sound effect as when you die. This is designed to give you the impression that you died. And this happens again and again and again. There's a final fight scene that really, really drags out because it pulls this gimmick about five times, that in addition to the 40 times it's been pulled in previous levels. This is merely mildly annoying and a sign of bad taste. In addition to getting worn out by repetition, this gimmick also suffers from the fact that it doesn't really work, or at least it didn't for me. It was just disorienting. I didn't go "OMFG I DIED WHAT DO I DO NOW?!" like I assume I was intended, but more like "What? I died again? Oh, well, respawn time. Wait, I didn't die? What the hell? Ah, well, moving on". And then it's done a hundred times more. Yes, I'm emphasizing that.
The real shit comes in the form of plot twists. Yes, apparently MW2's writing team decided that their award-winning franchise is above mediocre stories that are predictable and dull and, you know, make sense. In the closing hours of the game there are two twists that make absolutely no sense at all. The first is prisoner 627. We've found out that this prisoner is somebody that the bad guy, Makarov, really wants to see dead, so the British dedicate their resources to breaking 627 out of a Russian gulag.
So since we keep referring to him ambiguously as 627, it's obvious that his identity is going to be a big shocker. And it is, too, because prisoner 627 is none other than Captain Price. Why is it a shock? Because like everyone who ever finished the first Modern Warfare knows, Captain Price is dead! As a matter of fact the closing moments of MW were dedicated to watching Price and a bunch of other comrades die, followed by a rescue by friendly forces. So exactly how does this dead man, his body probably recovered by Allied forces, end up being alive at a Russian prison at the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula? And to add insult to injury, they don't even try to explain this. Everybody just takes Price return in their stride. Also, seeing as we were repeatedly told how Makarov really, really, really wants to get this guy, I wanted to know what Makarov wanted with Price. However, this aspect is dropped completely and Price just becomes a glorified military strategy consultant.
OK, whatever, forget Price for the moment. Let's take a gander at the second ridiculous twist. There's this American general named Shepherd who turns out to be the bad guy by betraying everybody, the good guys and other bad guys alike. And let me do a little summarizing statement here: everything about this Shepherd twist suffers from not being explained. Shepherd starts his betrayal by killing the guys he was supposed to be picking up and stealing the information these guys had stolen from Makarov's safe house. But apparently losing this information (what information was it anyway?) doesn't hinder our heroes in the least, and they proceed completely unfazed.
The biggest unexplained thing here is why Shepherd betrays the good guys. He does give some tirade about watching his men get killed some years ago, and apparently his endgame was to get the U.S. government to give him funds to make war on... somebody. But no, we never get a straight answer as to why he turned coat and what he hopes to achieve! But this twist is also annoying by its very nature, because it comes out of nowhere. It would have been just as feasible for a random helicopter pilot to declare himself the evil mastermind, and that's not very feasible!
Hey, I get wanting to have plot twists, and it's good, because it's fun and exciting, but only if they're done well! In my opinion any good plot twist is preceded by clues. This is not to allow the audience to guess the twits beforehand, but to show why it happened. You can repair the damage by explaining things later, but the best case scenario means that you can go through the story again and see, a-ha, this little bit here is foreshadowing the twist and I see that now that I know what the twist is! Resurrecting a dead man and making a completely normal good guy suddenly turn out to be the bad guy do not do this! And as I've already pointed out and I now point out yet again, neither twist is explained later on, either! I guess the game's writer just went "you know, screw this, I can't think of any exciting plot twists and these two are so nuts you couldn't explain them if you tried, why attempt to salvage anything".
There actually are, as such, some pretty cool moments in the final hand-to-hand showdown with General Shepherd, but the game pulls the goddamned Ha, You're Dead, Wait, No, You're Not something like half a dozen times in under five minutes, robbing the scene of all immediacy and impact. You know what the absolute worst part is in all this? They hint at a third game.
I find that Modern Warfare 2 is at the same time an excellent game, yet also a god-awful game. It's excellent in the sense that the gameplay mechanics work extremely well, but then again, those mechanics are the exact same as they were in the first Modern Warfare. To borrow another reviewer's example (of another game, though, but it fits here) you probably could switch MW2's game disc with that of MW1 and the player wouldn't notice. I'm told the graphics and enemy AI were improved upon, but the campaign is so hectic and frantic and fast-paced that you never have a chance to appreciate that.
What makes the game bad is simply the bad writing and utter, complete lack of gameplay innovation! And by bad writing I don't only mean these absurd plot twists and repeated use of the same gimmick that didn't really work in the first place. Unlike the first Modern Warfare, this game does not pull you in in any way at all. You're disconnected from the entire experience, unless, of course, you're in a highly suggestible state, like, say, drunk, stoned or extremely sleep-deprived. Or just being your average Call of Duty fan.
Having said that, I do realize that I may in fact just be going through what CoD fans go through when they play Halo. I readily admit not to being infallible. But just so you know, Halo 2 had a hell of a lot of innovation and Halo 3 at least tried to do something new, instead of just cashing on Halo 2's format by making a glorified map-pack and campaign extension. But that's beside the point. The point here is that really, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is in many ways a bad game. The only reason to get it is the multiplayer, because that's a good, functioning experience and got some improvements. But really, if you already have CoD 4, the first Modern Warfare, you should not buy this game, even though you probably already have, you mindless follower of military machismo.
Yeah, just like me. Ah, hell.
Good night, kids. Next time I will talk about Assassin's Creed II or rant about how much I hate grinding.
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