couldn't disagree with you more I'm afraid, with the exception of the gameplay (improved from the original) the game pales into comparison with the others. The characters are far less intriguing, Lamb feels no where near as intelligent or dangerous as Andrew Ryan, instead she seems just a smarmy voice on the radio prattling on about her philosophies. Delta, like Jack from #1, has to carry the game being a silent protagonist, but while Jack character made sense, he was a stranger to Rapture yet with a strong connection to it, he has to be talked through the city, we learn as he does, and when the big twist comes it is genuinely shocking, giving us, the player, sympathy towards him and the want to see him succeed. Delta, meanwhile, is a mook in a suit, we are told he was an average joe who found Rapture and was transformed, but that's about it. The psychic connection between him and his little sister was lazy writing at it's finest, as Yahtzee pointed out "Adam is like the Force in Star Wars, all purpose plot filler."
The game could have been interesting, had it followed the detective character instead of Delta, he had a genuine reason for going to Rapture, drive to make him keep going, he's new to the scenario, and would very likely begin using the plasmids to aid in his quest. Big Daddies don't work as protagonists, they are lumbering automatons with no free will or goals, the attempts to give Delta these characteristics do not work, instead it's like playing the whole game like Jack at the end of the first game wearing the pieces of the suit.
The game is a mess, and stinks to me of development hell, with so many different re-writes and changes to the characters and story, the game reflects this and is a jumbled collection of occasional interesting ideas swamped under poor writing.
I was expecting to hate this game, but I wound up enjoying it far more than Infinite. Completely avoiding the Halo-like gameplay limitations of only 2 weapons and regenerating shields made it a far more satisfying gameplay experience, and the plot really expanded on the concepts introduced in the original, and although the characterisation doesn\'t quite match up, it\'s still a great story.
I thought it was a vast improvement over the gameplay of the first game, the only misstep being how the Big Sisters will try to kill you, regardless of how you treat the little sisters (this makes no sense).
In terms of story, the game couldn't beat the uncanny twist of the first Bioshock, nor capture the original shock and awe. But I like how it ends up becoming a much smaller scale and personal story by the end. This is what gets recycled in Infinite, with the crazy, sci-fi world ultimately serving as a physical manifestation of clashing perspectives, belonging to just a couple of closely related people. I also like how the story takes a lumbering, bovine man who can fight off enemies by the dozen, and turns them into a hapless, sympathetic victim of circumstance. Minerva's Den does an even better job of it. It also helps that it has a much more sensible, morality based ending depending on your choices, rather than a saint/supervillain ending of the first game.
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^ I agree with most of your points, but I must ask: why would the Big Sisters not try to kill you? They\'re Lamb\'s brainwashed secret police; plus, the in-game guide says that their standard modus operandi for dealing with ADAM thieves is to either retrieve the Little Sister or the extracted ADAM. Why would they make any distinction between you and any other splicer?
People keep talking about the improved gameplay but no one mentions how that\'s not always a good thing. The game becomes real easy, real fast even on the hardest difficulty. You got souped up versions of the old plasmids, plus new OP ones and your weapons gain elemental damage of their own. There\'s almost no feeling of dread or challenge since resources are more than plenty.
Some will say that well, you\'re a big daddy, but none of these things (plasmids, weapon upgrades, resources) are attributed to their nature.
@threeballs Sure you're not talking about Infinite?
Too much of it copies the original game without holding any original ideas of its own. Bioshock was a commentary on objectivism and libertarianism and objectivism. Guns and drugs could be bought at any vending machine. Taking the ideologies to their extremes people could be killed or harvested in the streets so long as it didn\'t threaten the governing order. Bioshock 2 attempts to flip the script, but the players still have access to those vending machines as well as the harvesting mechanic, even though these elements run in contrast to communalism. There is another talking head the protagonist must battle, but she feels like a scavenger at best, her mission and ideals have little impact on the protagonist other than the fact that she is capable of throwing waves and waves of enemies at them. Andrew Ryan was able to build Rapture and have it running for at least a few years. Sophia preaches to crowd in a wreck of place, and it continues to be a wreck, meaning she has feet of clay right from the start, making her little more than a inferior copy of Ryan.
In Bioshock 2 the decay of the city is worse, but that\'s the most distinguishing thing I can say about the setting. In the first game, you feel the tragedy of a loss of ideas and civilization. Bioshock 2 simply progresses the city from uninhabitable to being more uninhabitable with little to offer to the player in terms of actual surprises.
^ Sofia Lamb\'s goal is not to rebuild Rapture, but to redefine humanity.
Indeed, she doesn\'t even give a damn about Rapture, and makes the point quite clear by flooding Siren Alley. How does it make Sofia look like she has feet of clay when she didn\'t do something she doesn\'t actually want to do?
More to the point, she is now ruling Rapture in ways that Ryan couldn\'t hope to achieve: the pheromone control is not even mentioned and is presumably not even in use; almost all the splicers in the city are members of the Rapture Family, tamed through a mixture of addiction and indoctrination; while Little Sisters are gathering, the Splicers trying to capture her aren\'t there to harvest her, but to get her away from you on Sofia\'s orders; there\'s a police force on duty - one that goes so far as to journey to the surface to kidnap children. There are even people donating their mortal remains to the Little Sisters on makeshift altars.
Contrast Ryan, who was dependent on the pheromone control and spent all his time playing golf in his office, talking smack about how awesome Rapture was going to be despite having zero ability to actually rebuild his utopia.
Ryan isn\'t risking failure in his war with Atlas and Jack; Ryan is a failure by the start of the game, and he\'s not even the real Big Bad. If you were to somehow lose, he would spend a few years moping in the ruins of his city, then drown without achieving a damn thing.
By contrast, Sofia starts the game with just about everything she needs to make her vision of a being without a sense of self a reality. She has all but won. If you were to fail, Eleanor will be mind-raped into the First Utopian... and with Rapture having served its purpose, Sofia will be free to expand the scope of her plans to encompass the surface.
It\'s even reflected in the performance: Ryan grumbles and roars and threatens and sermonizes, his quieter lines being devoted to wild fantasies of utopian success. He shouts because he has a desperate need to prove his superiority, because he has lost just about everything apart from the most rudimentary control of the city - because he has betrayed his own philosophy and undermined himself to the point of near-total collapse.
By contrast, Sofia Lamb practically whispers. She is cold, calm, and totally assured; she doesn\'t shout because she doesn\'t need to shout; she has all but won.
And all of this would be okay if you were arguing in terms of tragedy or the depth of his descent into corruption, but you were arguing in terms of effectiveness - and in that regard, Sofia has got Andrew dead to rights.
So, I ask again, how is Sofia an inferior copy of Andrew Ryan, when Ryan\'s only claim to fame was being the first and most vocal villain in the saga - and arguably the least successful of all of them?
Because he built Rapture. Ryan succeeded in building his city. It failed, eventually, but he actually gathered an impressive number of like-minds and thinkers toward his creation. Furthermore people initially followed him of their own free will. In contrast, Sophia consistently goes on about a perfect society, but people are stuck in a dangerous city that is falling apart. Sophia doesn\'t build anything, she just scavenges what was made by others.
You\'re right that I\'m not talking about Ryan being sympathetic. I certainly didn\'t like the guy on a moral level, but if we\'re talking about effectiveness, Ryan had his dream fulfilled before the game. Much of the game, itself, is Ryan stuck in the nostalgia of what worked initially while ignoring what fell through the cracks. Ryan\'s vision of what he wants actually existed, whereas Sophia\'s is speculation at best. Sophia has everyone trapped in a dangerous place while she repeatedly tells them everything will be fine, eventually. Sophia doesn\'t care about Rapture, but she really should considering all the resources she needs comes from the place and if it falls apart, everyone will die. Every time I walked through a flooded level, I kept wondering why everyone wasn\'t panicking over the concept of being crushed by a heavy amount of water. In another location, Lamb would be a good villain, but trapping everyone in Ryan\'s city after it fell apart, using resources of a city that was antithetical to her beliefs, and lacking concrete proof of general accomplishments makes me compare her as the lesser of the two. This is problematic since my chief issue of the second game how much it retreads the various elements of the first game. The first game\'s mechanics actually fitted into the games core themes. In contrast, Bioshock 2 is a lot of the same, with little being changed in spite of the difference in philosophy.
Ryan didn\'t build anything: he commissioned it; he\'s an ideas man getting the credit for the achievements of others. And the stuff he\'s using to maintain his Vestigial Empire wasn\'t even his idea at all - it was just stuff he claimed as his own. Plus, he spends the entire narrative insulated from any kind of risk up until you arrive in Hephaestus to kill him.
By contrast, Sofia Lamb takes a much more hands-on-approach for a Non-Action Big Bad: she was engineering prison riots, retrieving Eleanor personally, and conducting her own experiments, and seizing control of a city that Ryan and Fontaine left in ruins.
Also, Sofia got people to believe in her of their own free will around the same time public opinion in Ryan was hitting rock bottom. Why is Ryan getting people to follow him of their own will initially such an achievement?
Also, why everyone wasn\'t panicking? As I\'m sure we\'ve established by now, the Rapture Family is a death cult intent on being incorporated into Eleanor. They want to die.
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The Chain's Greatest Link
Bioshock 2 has an extremely undeserved reputation.
The gameplay is far superior to the other two, with easy use of both weapons and powers, and no limited inventory. Subject Delta is a rare breed in effective silent protagonists; from the very first scene, our knowledge of the setting is exploited to make us as connected to Eleanor as he is. We know he can't be her real father, we know their existence and their relationship to each other can be nothing short of tragedy from the start. As we see Eleanor's connection to him hold fast even after she's deprogrammed simply because she knows how terrible her mother is and she has no one else, we are put front and center to that tragedy. Even the bad endings are satisfying because they revolve around how that relationship turns out. Sofia Lamb is an effective antagonist: we never question her conviction and her more subdued personality compared to Fontaine gives her evil a more personal quality. Unlike the first game's cartoonishly absurd bad ending, the crux of every ending here is based on what kind of people Eleanor and Delta have become. More subtly, the plot does not go off the rails like the first game, especially, did. The emotional climax comes at the actual climax instead of several hours too early.
This entry, like much Infinite, is hurt by Hype Backlash. The ultimate role the Big Sisters play in the plot, indeed, the very fact that there are more than one, is inferior to the original idea scrapped late in production. While Lamb proves to be a more interesting villain than the Big Sister-as-Big Bad would have been by virtue of having a face and a belief system to disagree with instead of just simple villainy, the Big Sisters are reduced to a Boss in Mook Clothing. Tennenbaum vanishes almost as quickly as she's introduced until Minerva's Den. Finally, while the endings may provide closure with reflection on the choices you've made, those actual moments of choice are downright banal and certainly do nothing to advance the concept of morality systems in games, a concept that was in serious need of advancing when this game came out and still now as of this writing.
This is by far the strongest game in the trilogy, suffering from neither the first's pacing problems and clunky gameplay, or Infinite's undelivered promises and convoluted ending.