toblix

BioShock Infinite

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I didn't expect that I would want to post something on here before I started, but I finally got around to playing part 2 of the DLC.

As with the rest of the Bioshock Infinite content, my biggest problems are with the story/characterization.

Elizabeth's narrative was actually pretty good right up until the last 10 minutes

The characters themselves were fairly well done


I have to say I really disagree about the quality of the characters, and of Elizabeth's story especially. I don't think any of the game's attempts at emotional or affecting moments were earned because of how poorly fleshed out the majority of the characters were. In most cases, I had a really hard time understanding the motivations of any of them. The random enemies with their propaganda barks were pretty laughable, but even the main characters were often inscrutable. Why does Elizabeth care about this random little girl?

The game seems to hate its characters; and even worse - they seem to hate themselves! Booker had his self-loathing, and Elizabeth bizarrely offers her own take on this self-hatred. She starts blaming herself for the abduction of a girl she has no real connection to, in a world where the abduction of little girls is apparently commonplace, when she herself has been abused quite badly by the city and its denizens. All the while, she is decoding ciphers and repairing a quantum mumbo-jumbo machine through her own ingenuity (It brings Hitman to mind). And as her last act, having apparently developed a death wish, she delivers herself to Atlas and asks him to "get it over with" which he, of course, does. Where is this coming from? Or am I just missing something?

Why does the game want to drape its characters in such unremitting misery? What is it trying to say, with its world where caring about a political philosophy or trying to better a political situation necessarily results in mass slaughter, where even highly competent and earnest people can't help but be murdered? All this stands in stark contrast to what actually made me want to post - the 2 minute intro scene.

Despite everything I've said so far, I absolutely think you should play this DLC, if only for the intro scene. I've walked around in it for at least 10 minutes. It's nothing short of blissful, and genuinely made me sad that Irrational shut down. It does Disneyland way better than Disneyland does, with beautiful visual touches and truly incredible music effects. You start out with La Vie en Rose being sung by Piaf, played on a gramophone. As you move through the level, different parts of the mix fade in and then out again: orchestral strings, a man whistling, a girl on clarinet, a man singing, violin, accordion, guitar, female choir. Most of the sounds are diegetic. At the end of the section, Piaf has completely faded and been replaced by an instrumental trio and a non-diegetic female choir. I really can't do it justice - I found it beautiful. At the same time, you're walking through the streets, passing painters and musicians and vendors, most of whom have things to say to you. There's some cheesy romantic lines in French that are a treat if you can understand them. At one point Elizabeth asks a man in a bookshop for Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and he replies that he's sorry but it hasn't been written yet. It's happy, and warm, and transporting. There's so many cool little touches that show off the creators' talents. Even the distortion effect on the bookshop's windows is a cool artistic choice. I wanted to be there, and was sad when the music changed to signal that the miseryfest was about to start. It's not that I don't like sad or depressing things - I loved PI and Melancholia - but there better be a good payoff to make it worth it, something the Bioshock writing just didn't have.

Well, I started writing this a few hours ago but got distracted, and now I've sort of lost where I had planned to land this argument. I guess it just makes me sad because it seems unlikely that we're going to get a big-budget, first-person, optimistic, beautifully realized world without a bunch of violence or grit for grit's sake, like the one from the intro to the DLC any time soon. Maybe someone's working on something like this and I have a huge blind spot? Maybe they're porting the Mass Effect Citadel DLC to the streets of Paris? One hopes.

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The DLC goes from a Disneyland version of Paris to a classic noir story, and film noir as a genre was born out of Parisian film critics misreading a certain strain of American film from the 30s and 40s. So there's a clever nod to that interplay going on here.

 

It's fair to criticize the DLC as nothing more than sort of an exercise in genre certainly, but it answers some of the questions you have about why certain things happen the way they happen.

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I've never played any of the DLCs so anything I said about the characters was only within the context of the main game.  From what I'm hearing, it sounds like the DLC changes a lot of that characterization in weird ways.

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I've never played any of the DLCs so anything I said about the characters was only within the context of the main game.  From what I'm hearing, it sounds like the DLC changes a lot of that characterization in weird ways.

 

Ah ok, sorry to rope you in then.

 

 

It's fair to criticize the DLC as nothing more than sort of an exercise in genre certainly, but it answers some of the questions you have about why certain things happen the way they happen.

 

I dunno, I fully comprehended the sequence of events and what was happening in the plot. What I'm saying is that the characters' motivations seemed really strange / unrealistic to me. 

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Despite everything I've said so far, I absolutely think you should play this DLC, if only for the intro scene. I've walked around in it for at least 10 minutes. It's nothing short of blissful, and genuinely made me sad that Irrational shut down. It does Disneyland way better than Disneyland does, with beautiful visual touches and truly incredible music effects. You start out with La Vie en Rose being sung by Piaf, played on a gramophone. As you move through the level, different parts of the mix fade in and then out again: orchestral strings, a man whistling, a girl on clarinet, a man singing, violin, accordion, guitar, female choir. Most of the sounds are diegetic. At the end of the section, Piaf has completely faded and been replaced by an instrumental trio and a non-diegetic female choir. I really can't do it justice - I found it beautiful. At the same time, you're walking through the streets, passing painters and musicians and vendors, most of whom have things to say to you. There's some cheesy romantic lines in French that are a treat if you can understand them. At one point Elizabeth asks a man in a bookshop for Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and he replies that he's sorry but it hasn't been written yet. It's happy, and warm, and transporting. There's so many cool little touches that show off the creators' talents. Even the distortion effect on the bookshop's windows is a cool artistic choice. I wanted to be there, and was sad when the music changed to signal that the miseryfest was about to start. It's not that I don't like sad or depressing things - I loved PI and Melancholia - but there better be a good payoff to make it worth it, something the Bioshock writing just didn't have.

 

That section is the best part of the DLCs by far, and possibly the best part of the entire Infinite experience. It stunned me. I also spent a ton of time meandering back and forth and listening to the various instruments fade in and out looking for the actual sources. It was a really unique interactive experience. You can't start a show with a showstopper though. Nothing else in the DLC is as fun or good as that part, and that's regardless of the execution of the stealth/shooter part of the game (which I don't think is great).

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Levine revealed on Twitter last night that his core idea for the Vita Bioshock game was a turn based Final Fantasy Tactics type game set in pre-fall Rapture.  Even as down as I am on the BI story, that sounds freaking terrific mechanically.  Shame it was never meant to be. 

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BOOM, I've been waiting for the DLC to go on sale. shazam shazam. This is EU only by the way, oh and on the PS3

 

BioShock Infinite Season Pass
Was £15.99/€19.99/$29.95, now £11.49/€13.99/$20.95
10% additional PS Plus discount

Burial at Sea – Episode 1
Was £11.99/€14.99/$22.95, now £6.19/€7.49/$11.25
10% additional PS Plus discount

Burial At Sea – Episode 2
Was £11.99/€14.99/$22.95, now £6.19/€7.49/$11.25
10% additional PS Plus discount

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