A vocal complaint regarding 2007's Bioshock was that the home stretch felt vastly inferior to what came before. For the most part I agree. Most of the back end of the game, particularly the becoming-a-Big-Daddy sequence, was needlessly drawn out and clearly included as a means of padding game length. It was like the Metroid Prime series' MacGuffin hunt all over again, but worse since Bioshock had a better sense of pacing and momentum than the Metroids. Also... dude, if you ever figure out that the guy on the other end of the radio you're holding has a backdoor into your mind involving verbal commands... would you kindly drop the goddamned radio? (I'm actually not too bothered by this since the radio was such a powerful narrative conceit in the game. I'm fairly confident 2K Boston was aware of the Fridge Logic at work there, but considered a necessary evil to keep the game rolling. It's really only the MacGuffin hunt that pissed me off, anyway.) Anyway, what I wanted to mention today is that one thing kept me riveted to the screen even in spite of some of these things, some of which I consider mortal sins both in game design and storytelling: Frank Fontaine.
I guess it's clear at this point that Fontaine is exactly the kind of villain I like in my games. Somewhat like Heath Ledger's Joker, what I appreciate most in Fontaine is that he's presented as an absolute - almost a force of nature. No backstory, no Freudian excuse, no misunderstood ideology, no higher calling or motivation. Just a small-time grifter with nakedly sociopathic tendencies, doing what he was obviously born to do: fuck shit up. If anything, I saw Fontaine as an almost karmic reaction to the kind of society Ryan was trying to create. Consider the environments you run through in Bioshock, like Fort Frolic, the Kashmir restaurant, the Medical Pavilion; consider the opulence, the self-aggrandizement, the sheer voraciousness of the city's Randan self-interest, and it'll become clear that the people of Rapture were almost daring a Frank Fontaine to come along and run their pockets. I know Rapture fell for many different reasons, of which Fontaine wasn't even the most prominent, but his particular role in the city's destruction felt karmic and eerily predestined, at least to me it did.
Anyway, I'm starting to show my Bioshock fanboyism, so I'll cut it short here. I told you the kind of villain that most resonates with me. So what about you? Do you like the force of nature type as much as I do? What about the idealist who's gone too far, like Andrew Ryan? The avenger? The mastermind? The lunatic? Do you think Bioshock 2 will deliver on the kind of villainy you're looking for?
Cornman89
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