Giant Bombcast 837: R1 to Brood

Is there a specific month all of game industry Twitter decided it was cool to no longer like Bioshock Infinite because of one plot point? The game gets such a bad rap for absolutely no reason.

I’ll be that stubborn guy who disagrees with people saying it’s overrated. Its rating in those launch reviews is exactly as high as it should be. It plays great, had great visuals for the time, had an interesting time travel/dimension hopping narrative, surprisingly effective use of licensed/traditional songs. I wholly agree that the plot point people complain about is kinda wack and stupid, but it doesn’t single-handedly drag the whole game into B-tier. That’s crazy; the game is great and it deserves its spot in the top 3.

I especially don’t understand caring that much about mishandling one aspect of the Columbia politics/revolution plot line, especially when the city ends up being the B plot that gets overwritten so many times by all the dimension hopping that it’s nearly irrelevant, and the actual A plot in the last like 33% of the game is almost solely main character and Elizabeth and their relationship. The thing everyone gets mad about is basically a throwaway midgame storyline when the game is still bamboozling you into thinking the game is about the fall of Columbia and the excesses of its ideology like Bioshock 1 was (the game is not about this, the ideology is just standard American exceptionalism/Christian nationalism turned up to 11, almost no audio logs even talk about it because every log is about them experimenting on Elizabeth or dimension hopping or whatever).

The $20 metroidvania vs the $50 metroidvania discussion is one of the reasons I tend to defend Jeff's take that game reviews should always be partially a product review.

This is especially true given how alot of people only buy 3 games per year at absolute max, and one of those is extremely rarely anything not an evergreen game that's white hot. They'd need that extra evidence is needed for them to consider those many other games at all.

@janman Suikoden 3 is fantastic and Sargent Joe owns.