HA! Bet you didn't think we could do it, but we did! It only took us a few days, instead of months! So we're back to playing Bioshock Infinite!!

... [sobs deeply]

Once again, we've been doing this a while, so here's the portal to all the previous threads https://twitter.com/IrisHeartfang/status/1130570995327221760?s=20

Here's the thing; Bioshock Infinite is racist. You know it, I know it, we all know

At this point we've beaten that point into the ground, so we're going to try & give it a rest this thread. Because in that discussion, it's often lost that it's also just a badly written story

Granted, we will talk about that if something new and horrific comes up. But this section is going to have some important... Story? bits in it, so it's a good time to talk about how poorly put together this mess is

The instant we start this session, Liz is like "the vox are tearing the city apart!" And putting aside the "both sides" racism of that statement, the game's made it clear from the start that Columbia is pleasant on the surface but IS ACTUALLY MESS UP(tm)

So how am I supposed to feel about this? Liz says it like it's a terrible thing, but Infinite has hammered home just how vile a place Columbia is the entire game

So why wouldn't I cheer for the Vox to destroy this hellhole?

It's a good example of how even when you put aside the racism, Bioshock Infinite's story is just a mess functionally

Everything, from the lighting, to the sound, to Liz's very on the nose dialogue is telling me I should be horrified by this. But all I can muster up is

There's a reason I chose this as the header picture because this area is really good! It's a big area, with several different levels of elevation, and skylines over all of it

In theory, this area would make for a great & memorable combat encounter

Unfortunately, the combat in Infinite is pretty bad. Again, finding your foes is a pain because the colors are so drab, and it doesn't help that most of them share the same color schemes as the environment

And all of that is magnified a hundredfold in an area this big

The combat of this game should be the high point of the whole thing, specifically because it's 3 dimensional! Fighting on different tiers of elevation, IN THE SKY, sounds awesome!

But the difficulty in finding enemies takes what should be amazing and makes it a chore

Because while the color scheme thing is a big issue, it's also the complete uselessness of the damage indicator

It's the standard "flash red to show where you took a hit from" deal, but it doesn't do anything to tell you the position of your enemy, especially not their elevation

And it's also made worse by the ever present evil of the modern FPS; the hitscan weapon! I'll put an image here to explain what a hitscan is technically, but the short of it is that you cannot dodge attacks in this game

If an enemy fires at you, you will get hit

And because you spend so much time flailing about, trying to figure out where in the heck your enemies are, makes it a real pain in the butt that you cannot avoid attacks at all

It's like a game of hide and go seek in a minefield

Added to all of this that there's no curve or escalation to core of the combat, means the thing you do for 9/10ths of this game is just an exercise in tedium

It's very easy to just mindlessly mash the buttons until you die or all your enemies die

Speaking of dying, the only penalty to death in this game is a little bit of money lost, and you're put right back in

That makes it very easy to plod through this game's combat with a lazy flurry of birds & punches without needing to aim a single shot

We found the final vigor. I remember really liking this one in my playthrough, but my sister's like "I already have birds and water, I'm good"

And I can't really blame her. It's so late in the game & all the vigors have been so similar that this seems like the logical response

Another thing is that Liz throws stuff at the player like ammo & health which she just generates out of the ether, but this means the player can't hold onto med packs to make liz seem more useful, making surviving harder

I said this before, but it was 100 years ago. So whatever

We found a gate that mistook Liz for her mother because she's wearing the same clothes because WHY NOT. But it's also finger print activated, so now we're going to rob her mum's grave to get her time displaced hands because SURE

Ya know, Ride to Hell came out the same year & its solution to a fence in your way was to destroy a power plant to cause the fence to power down, and that was at least absurdly hilarious

Yeah, I'm now comparing Bioshock Infinite unfavorably to Ride to Hell now. So that's funny

OK, I was assuming! Her fingers aren't going to be time displaced; her corpse is just preserved for the 19 years since her death! BECAUSE SURE

Anyway, we're about to take her 19 year dead hand before Comstock shows up and somehow uses Elizabeth's powers against her? Because he can do that??

Anyway, the result is Elizabeth's mom is a ghost now, and she will be the enemy we're fighting for the rest of this chapter

So we're fighting a ghost now! That's exciting! And the atmosphere is delightfully creepy! So as long as she's got a cool gimmick, this could actually be a fun fight!

AND NOPE! She just endlessly summons hordes of the same dudes you've been fighting. Because of course she does

Now you might be thinking "so they just wasted this incredible potential for a memorable horror boss for the exact same kind of fights you've been doing throughout the entire game?" And to that I say "NO! Because it's actually WAY WORSE!"

The thing is she's the target. You need to kill her to move on. But she summons enemies way faster than you can kill them, and she's constantly moving around the battlefield

So you need to find and kill her while dealing with all the BS that you already deal with in EVERY fight

And how did we beat this sinister specter? This horrifying apparition with control over death itself??

We ran up and hit her until we died, and we kept doing that until she died

Game design is my passion

At least the Lutece twins are back, and they're delightful as always. It's a shame all that's really said in the end is "go to 3 locations, kill the ghosty in each, and then finish her off in one final battle"

gaamle dassin iis my pafffin

Elizabeth: I brought something back. But... I'm not sure it was her

Sister:

So the three locations have a memory of Lady Comstock in each one. And the first one had a conversation between her and Rosalind Lutece

This is the first time two women have spoken to each other in this entire game

Guess what they were talking about

If your guess was "a man," then you are correct!

If your guess was "arguing over which one of them had heterosexual sex with a man" you are painfully correct and I am so sorry your brain is as poisoned by bad media as mine is

I'm still trying to figure out why or how Comstock was able to force Elizabeth to use her powers to create an emotional construct of her mother's fragmented memories and lingering regret, but I'm guessing Bioshock Infinite's only answer is

Oh. The klan guys are back. I haven't missed them

I know with the ghost & all you probably forgot the Vox is pillaging the city (BI did, too) but they are

So the only explanations I can think of is either they're working with the vox or they're the only ones standing up to them, and both are more "yikes" than I care to think on

Real talk here: Video games have a LOT of dead space in them, especially narrative ones. Points where you're just walking from point A to B

And in story based ones, like this is supposed to be, those moments can be filled with dialogue lines that help build the characters

And this game has those, but every single exchange is either a two sentence exchange that adds nothing and means nothing, or trite attempts at being profound that oozes all the intellectual depth of one once puddle

And in either case, it makes me like the characters less

liz: "50% of everything people earn here goes right to Comstock as a tithe"

Booker: "I gotta get me a job in the prophet business"

What am I supposed to take from that other than Liz brought it up for no reason and Booker is just a jerk?

We also found the last memory, which was in a bank. And I'm glad we didn't see anything antisemitic there, it's a good reminder that Bioshock Infinite, a game supposedly about racial oppression, doesn't even acknowledge the existance of one the most persecuted groups in history

Ok. I finally got a good look at these guys, and these ones are in red. Considering that all the ones we saw before were purple and the vox uniform is the same shade of red, I guess that answers my question

I wasn't expecting an answer, but I can't say I'm surprised. WTF

So this whole "find 3 memories" thing is basically just to spoon feed you plot info. In any story where you set up questions, you need to give answers. And while dumping them all at once like this isn't ideal, sometimes it's just where the chips fall

On its own, that's whatever

But there are some problems with this (natch)

1) each one of these memories are questions neither I nor the game ever asked

"Who's Liz's parents?"
"Who killed the Luteces?"

Like, were these mysteries that were vital to solve? I either knew already or never thought to ask

2) These "answers" only raise more questions! For example, the memory about Liz's parents claim that Rosalina Lutece is Liz's real mother, but she denies this

So these aren't making things clearer, it's just making everything more confusing

And you could say that's what they're trying to do; they're trying to set up mysteries

But A) it's way too late to bring this info if it's supposed to matter. It should have been brought up way earlier...

... And B) I can't think of a hackier way to set up a mystery subplot than stopping the game's entire momentum to bring them up out of nowhere, all at once

This game's writing is so basic

WAIT A SECOND! They weren't purple! They were blue! The same as comstock's men!

GOD this game gets worse every time! And if they hadn't shown up, I would have gotten through one of these bloody threads without bringing up racism!

Screw you, magic crow klan! Screw you!

So we finally kill the ghost after a very long, tedious battle & Liz makes amends with her mum! Kinda

I mean, she doesn't talk with her, she kinda just speaks at her. And it's not like Lady Comstock had any personality outside of banshee wail, so the whole thing just falls flat

And the both side(tm) crap isn't limited to racism! Oh, no! For it turns out that parental abuse also has 2 sides!

For you see! Liz needed to apologize to her mum for how much she hated her for... Reasons. I mean, she was dead. There wasn't really any reason for this conflict

It's one of those things that older people do, where it's like "kids need to forgive their parents" and, like, no they don't

I'm a big believer in forgiveness, but that's a personal choice. And Infinite just forces it on you. Like it's the "right thing to do(tm)"

Oh, and as a final epitaph to this thread, remember when Songbird interrupted that big, emotional choice booker had to make? Whether to clear his debt in New York or give Liz her freedom by going to Paris? Yeah, he chooses Paris, and we know this because of a loading screen

GOD

And with that another Bioshock Infinite thread comes to a close! It was interesting for how much Infinite failed to structure its story & for how little racism there was this time around! Much fun!

Next thread will be rather interesting, too, I think. But that's for another day