Today, I finished Bioshock Infinite and I thought it was a fantastic game. Fun combat, good character dynamics, a brilliant world, and a hell of an amazing ending (seeing Rapture again had me yelling out loud at my TV in disbelief).

But when it was all over, I realized something. I didn't really know who Daisy Fitzroy and Zachry Comstock were. Not in the sense that I didn't know who they were, but that I didn't understand why they did the things they did.

I missed half of the Voxophones, so I probably missed a huge portion of their backstories, but the original Bioshock put so much effort into characterizing Andrew Ryan. His constant taunting of the player made him a monstrous presence, and the Audio Logs were only a bonus to helping to understand who Andrew Ryan truly was. You could miss the Audio Logs and still have a good understanding of what drove the man.

I didn't feel that way about Daisy or Zachry. When Daisy turned into an insane power broker, it made sense in the context of revolutions driving people to do terrible things (Elizabeth's comparison to Les Miserables is quite apt), but I didn't feel like she had been characterized as well as any random side character in the original. I still remember the Doctor from the Med Bay in Rapture, wishing to become the Picasso of surgery.

The biggest problem is that I never really got a sense of who Zachry is, and after the game's ending revealing that Booker DeWitt became Zachry, it seems like it would be pretty fucking important to understand how the pleasure to seek God turned a soldier into a prophet. There are probably Voxaphones that address this a bit, but I never felt like I knew Comstock, not the way I knew Dr. Tennenbaum, or Frank Fontaine, and so on.

The trade off I guess is that Booker and Elizabeth are incredibly realized characters, with arcs and dynamics that made playing through the story a journey, not just to defeat Comstock, but to find out more about who they really were at their cores. I just wish the Daisy and Comstock were the same way. I wish they felt like fully realized characters and went beyond cutouts of the concepts of religious insanity and blind anarchy.

Other than this, I loved the game overall. I just feel like they were lacking in development.

I took it more as that when the other booker got baptized he was nearly drowned by the priest and either had brain damage or near death experiences from lack of air.

Listen to more of the Voxophones they kinda fill in that he really thinks he is some gift from god and he can do no wrong.

I yelled at my TV too; I was playing on my PC, but I just have a habit of yelling at random household items.

My problem with the story was that it was a little overwrought; I enjoyed it, but there's definitely something to be said about keeping a story simple.

@the_laughing_man: During my second playthrough of the game I'll have to listen to more of the Voxaphones. The few I found were interesting. The one comparing black people to being below dogs was terrifying. I just feel like even if you didn't pick up a single audio log, you knew exactly what kind of person Andrew Ryan was. That's really my problem with the game. If you didn't find a single Voxaphone, Comstock is just a guy who thinks he can talk to God that happened to have a good scientist friend. Ryan was iron-willed and believed in his own philosophy so much he died for it intentionally.

The couple who followed you the entire game just wanted to do science stuff and Comstock had the money. But ya. I see it more that Comstock more or less went loony after the botched baptism

Also...we are also ignoring one thing.....What if...Comstock was not born from a botched baptism...but when Liz tried to drown Booker? If you set after the credits you wake up in your old office and go to the baby door.....what if thats when you see " The angel"

Booker seeks baptism because he is consumed by guilt over the atrocities he committed at Wounded Knee. Whether or not he accepts the baptism, it doesn't help. In the Booker continuity this guilt manifests itself in alcoholism and gambling. In the Comstock continuity he tries to reconcile his misdeeds by seeing non-whites as subhuman. You murder man. You put down an animal.

The religious zealotry comes from a vision of Columbia he sees shortly after his baptism, most likely through a tear, that his non-scientific mind interprets as a gift from God in the form of prophecy.

Well think about the last scene. Liz drowns booker. And who do all the angel states in Columbia look like?