Not been as big of a gap between blogs this time, huh? Also I figured that I had enough to say about Mafia III to let that be its own thing.
Mafia III.
Mafia III is a bit of a tough one to write about, or at least start writing about. You know, it's always the beginning that's the hardest, for me at least. Before I get into discussing the actual "loop" of the game, I want to be up front: Mafia III is a fantastic "story" wrapped around a good but mostly not great "game." I just wanted to get that out of the way before I spend a pages criticizing the game, so you know I like it.
When I say "story," I really mean the characters, the writing, and mostly the performances. Aside from the "documentary" part of the game (interviews with characters many years after the fact), the actual beat to beat plot of the game is pretty standard. Lincoln Clay returns from war (Vietnam, in 1968), gets re-involved in the local organized crime scene even though he really didn't want to, gets double crossed, and goes out on revenge. First Lincoln builds a "team" of under-bosses to help him run the districts he takes over, and then he goes and Saints Rows his way through the city, one district at a time.
Okay, technically he has to Saints Row some districts to give them to the under-bosses before they join up, but you get what I mean. And when I say "Saints Row," I mean any open world crime-ish game where you have to take control of sections of the city through a bunch of often repeated tasks just makes me think of Saints Row. I thought the same thing about Assassin's Creed Syndicate last year too. I don't mean this as an inherently negative thing; both Saints Row The Third and IV are really great. If what you are doing is sufficiently enjoyable, varied enough, and not repeated too many times, I have no problem repeating tasks throughout a city.
I think Mafia III's biggest issue is ultimately that what you do isn't quite enjoyable enough, isn't varied enough, and is repeated too many times. I can count the number of types of tasks on one hand. You either need to kill someone, interrogate someone, rescue some people, blow up some stuff, or steal a truck. Sometimes it'll be a bespoke thing you need to blow up, like a toxic waste dump inside a regular dump, but otherwise it's just those same five tasks, and really, rescuing people only happens a couple times, so it's more like four tasks. When I wrote this, I was wracking my brain to try to remember if there was some other type of task, because this sounds even more repetitive than it felt when I played the game.
Anyway, the goal in each district is to take over its (two) rackets, and then go after the boss of the district. In order to take down a racket, enough financial damage needs to be done, through those repeated tasks. There's some amount of choice involved, like whether to keep or kill informants, and the same with some of the racket bosses. Killing them gives some immediate cash, whereas keeping them alive adds to the total value of the racket once it's in your control. On hand cash was never something I was especially in need of (when you buy stuff, it can come straight out of your stockpiled cash, so there's no need for it), so I usually kept them alive. Unless one of them got particularly "mouthy" at me.
Once you take over a racket, you have to decide which under-boss to give it to, Cassandra, Vito, or Burke. Of the game play systems, this is actually the (potentially) most interesting one. Each of the three bosses has their own skill tree (well, maybe more of a skill flower, as they're linear) for Lincoln, and the bigger their overall income, the more stuff you unlock for each. Cassandra, for example, gives Lincoln access to a (comically small) weapons van he can call (using his handy radio), various upgrades to the weapons (accuracy, reload speed, etc), and some voodoo dolls(?). I put the question mark, because, well, they're a little odd, and I didn't use them much, honestly. They supposedly distract enemies, but they never worked well for me. Maybe because I never tried to use them until the enemies were already aware of me.
As an aside, while this game has a reputation for being comically buggy, this was the only instance of that sort of stuff happening to me. I don't know if that's because of luck, or because they fixed a lot of that stuff.
Anyway, Vito's upgrades are more focused on giving Lincoln more health, better stamina (for sprinting), and stuff like that. The in game explanation is that he has access to a mob doctor, because illicit medicine seems to be the future of American healthcare. He also gives Lincoln access to a consigliere who will pick up his on hand cash, and (once upgraded) collect the takes from the various under-bosses. The former is because this is the "Dark Souls of open world crime games," which is my stupid way of saying you lose a bunch of money when you die. It's a bad comparison because you can't then go and find it after coming back. Anyway, the health upgrades are very useful because even with said upgrades, Lincoln can still die very quickly if you aren't smart about using cover.
And finally there's Burke, who lives in a junkyard, and despite being my least favorite character of the three, he has the most useful ability. Call up one of his associates, and they will deliver a car to Lincoln, from a selection that increases as the game goes on. I used this A LOT throughout the game, because there's no cost to it, it's fast, and it's safer than trying to steal a car in broad daylight. However, one of Burke's (mostly car focused) upgrades is the ability to stealthily steal cars, which is also very useful. But I'm pretty sure one of the cars you can summon is literally the fastest car in the game, and you can get upgrades for the cars you summon so that they are tougher, and have bulletproof tires, so there's still plenty of incentive to use those cars.
Each of the under-bosses also has an ability that costs Lincoln either some money, or a Mark, which he gets by doing tasks for the under-bosses. It's like getting favors from them for doing stuff. Give Vito a district, and he'll let you call up some of his heavily armed thugs for backup, for free! Now that I think about it, I dunno why they're called "Marks" when favor makes a lot more sense. Anyway, they're useful abilities. Again, Burke wins by having the best one, which is to just straight up call off the police, or have them turn a blind eye to most crimes during the duration of the ability (which can also be upgraded). Cassandra's has all the local phone-lines cut, which is useful for stopping witnesses from calling the police, or enemies from calling for backup. All useful abilities.
Each of the under-bosses has their own under-under-boss that you get some side missions from, and I wish they had bigger roles in the game. Honestly, I think they're all more interesting than the people they work for. I want to know more about Alma's history with Vito, and Burke's daughter Nicki. Just when these characters started getting really interesting, they run out of missions for you to do. Sure, you can navigate through the labyrinthine places they live and hold Square to talk to them, but then they just repeat the same few lines of dialog. Nicki, being the one SPOILER queer character in the game, I especially would've liked to see more of her. Sadly, it wasn't to be.
What makes the under-boss system interesting is that, in theory, these are ornery crime folk that don't get along with each other, and you need to do whatever you can to keep them in line. If you don't, one may end up betraying you, and then you'll have to go and literally kill them. In actuality, it's very easy to keep them all happy. All you need to do is assign both rackets in a district to the same person, give that person the district, and then do the same for another of them in the following district. Then do the same with the third person in the district after that, and repeat until the game is over. There just happens to be the right number of districts in the game so that they all have an equal number.
You might be wondering why someone wouldn't do it that way. Well, the reason is that you won't get all of the upgrades for any one of the three. One of them would require at least one, maybe two more districts than the others. I don't know how that would make the others react. Maybe you'd still keep all three alive, and mostly loyal. Speaking of, each of them has side missions you can do to also increase their loyalty. But, aside from Vito, I didn't do all of them, because they're not good missions. They all involve some amount of stealing trucks or boats from the bayou. The only reason I did Vito's was because he then had me go and assassinate some people, which was fun, and I thought it might have some interesting story pay off. It didn't have as much pay off as I had hoped. Maybe it'd have meant more if I played Mafia II, where Vito was the main character.
Honestly, I wish the game as a whole was shorter, because I do want to mess around with this system. See what happens if I give all of the districts to one person. I wonder if you lose access to stuff like being able to summon cars at will. The game makes it sound like you'd lose access to the upgrades you get from assigning rackets if you then give the district as a whole to someone else (I should clarify that you can't give the two rackets in a district to two different under-bosses, and then have them share the district). That would really change how I played the game if I couldn't just summon cars at will.
But since the game was at least thirty hours long, that's longer than I really want to commit to for a second play through, just to see how that stuff changes if you treat the under-bosses differently. At least for a game as repetitive, and unvaried as this one is. I was more than happy enough to play through games of this length like Mass Effect a bunch of times, but Mass Effect wasn't thirty hours of blowing up generic trucks guarded by generic armed thugs.
Speaking of, something that really bothered me, during my initial hours with the game, was a combination of the collectibles, and the mini-map. I've said before that I don't like mini-maps in general, and I found it especially bothersome here. Partly because I find it hard to not compulsively stare at the map when I'm driving (even if the game has an in world system to direct you, like this game does), but also because of the collectibles. Now, I don't just mean the stuff you collect for the sake of collecting, of which there is plenty in this game.
Though, while I'm on the subject, I think the collectibles in this game are kind of bizarre. Why licensed PlayBoy magazines? The first one I looked at had pages and pages of articles, which I thought was funny, and that maybe this game trying to make some sort of commentary about that stuff. Then the next one I looked at was just a picture of a nude lady, so I stopped looking at them. Not that I have issues with pictures of nude ladies (I just realized, days after writing this initially, "issues" is a magazine pun), it just seemed out of place with the rest of the game. All that said, if every one of those in game PlayBoys was just articles, and no nudes, that would be hilarious.
Okay, I got really far off track there, sorry.
Anyway, Mafia III has a vision mode, like many games that have existed since the halcyon days of Assassin's Creed 1, the earliest game I could think of to have a "modern game vision mode." It's primary use in Mafia III is to see enemies through walls. It's mapped to the Touchpad on PS4, which is not a great button for it, but I still hit it many times. At the start of the game, Lincoln can't see through walls unless he's wiretapped the area, which is just common sense. Also common sense, he can't wiretap an area (from specific points around the city, like Assassin's Creed towers) unless he has the parts to make a wiretap. In yet another case of common sense, he needs three such parts for each wiretap, and the parts can't be bought in stores, or just procured from thin air. No, he needs to search around in the city for them. Luckily, after wiretapping an area, or just by getting close enough to them, they appear on the mini-map.
What I'm getting at is that my need to see enemies through walls (because the game was just challenging enough, due to the lack of health, for me to find it useful) sent me on an hours long quest to find these stupid collectibles, and to wiretap large parts of the game. I spent over an hour just traversing the bayou to wiretap all of it. I also spent a good amount of that time picking up all the other collectibles that I found, which is how I ended up with so many of those PlayBoys, and Hot Rod magazines, and album covers for music I often don't like.
I did all that partly because of my natural compulsion to do stuff like that, and also because I knew that if I did too much of it early on, it'd break me of it, and I'd just get used to not being able to see enemies through walls. Luckily the game had an answer for me, in the form of one of Vito's upgrades being that I could see through walls without needing to wiretap. I guess his mob doctor had some X-Ray glasses on hand (actually I think it's a consigliere upgrade, for whatever reason). Once I got that, I was free. Free, and with about 60 of those wiretap parts left in my inventory, and who knows how many magazines full of nudes and hot rods. No, I don't think any of them have both nudes and hot rods.
Point is: I would've liked this game more without a mini-map to distract me, and without all that stupid wiretapping to take up so much of my time in the early parts of the game. If you play this, and have similar compulsions, please, remember the Vito upgrade! And, so far as I could tell, there's no option to turn the mini-map off altogether. I know most people don't get bothered by that stuff like I do, but...That's a discussion for another time.
The only other part of Mafia III as a "game" that I feel like I should mention are the more bespoke, story missions. At the beginning of the game, and any time Lincoln takes on someone heading up a district, rather than just another cookie cutter mission, it's more elaborate than that. More unique locations, often some good use of licensed music, and sometimes even co ol, unique mechanics. These are the big setpiece moments of the game, like blowing up a paddle wheel gambling boat, or shooting and recklessly driving through an abandoned mine. These are way more interesting, and more fun than the generic missions that make up the bulk of the game. On one hand, that's good, because it'd be really disappointing if the entire game was generic, but on the other, it makes me wish there was more stuff like that throughout the game.
But then there's the story. Like I said up front, the plot is fairly standard, but it's the performances, more than anything else. I honestly think Mafia III has some of the best performances I've ever heard, or seen (pretty sure they used facial capture, based on the quality of the facial animations, and that Nolan North's character looks almost exactly like him) in any video game. It's up there with Uncharted 4, from earlier this year (though Mr. North has a much smaller, and let's say less likable role in Mafia III). It's not just that the acting is superb, it's that it's a lot of characters doing, and saying things that video game characters don't often get the chance to do. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but most dialog in games tends to be stuff like commands from people, jokey banter, or bad guys yelling at you.
Mafia III, meanwhile, likes to show you just how much these characters feel regret. Or sadness, or sorrow. Yes, it has jokey banter, commands, and a lot of bad guys yelling, but even that stuff is mostly better than most other games. Honestly, don't take my word for it, if you haven't played the game, watch a clip of it. I found one of my favorite character in the game, Father James. It's short, and doesn't really spoil anything, if you're worried about that.
Be warned, if you watch the video on YouTube, some of the suggested videos have spoiler filled titles. Be prepared!
And finally, related to the story, is the much talked about handling of race, racism, and similar topics by the game. Now, obviously I'm too white, and too young to tell you that this game is an accurate depiction of racism in the south in that era, though I've heard enough from people that would know that it sounds like it's at least pretty close. However, I can at least tell you that the game uses it well to convey the sort of story it wants to tell. Even with the great performances, if this was just another game about a white mobster taking revenge out on other white mobsters, that'd get kind of boring. Well, boring isn't the right word.
What I'm trying to say is that it's refreshing to see a game actually tackle things like race, and racism by using, you know, real world issues. Rather than obscuring it behind cyborg implants, and not even doing a good job of it. Though, one complaint I will file against Mafia III is that the one punch they pull is regarding the KKK. Rather than having Lincoln fight the actual KKK, they ginned up a fictional group called the "Southern Union," which Lincoln describes as, "might as well be the Klan." They have the white hoods (which range from crappy sacks to more bespoke robes), and I won't spoil what happens, but they do some awful, horrible things in the game. This was the one district where I went out of my way to complete all of the missions, because I wanted to see those racists suffer and DIE.
But, yeah, I wish it was actual KKK Lincoln went after. I dunno why it isn't. Maybe 2K was afraid of getting sued? Well, whatever. Even if it is a surrogate white supremacist group, in this modern day and age, even as a white person, it felt good to murder some digital racists.
Before I end this, I do want to say something about the ending of the game, so obvious SPOILER warnings for that.
Oh, and one last thing. While I think the licensed music is about on par with most games with licensed music (which is to say I don't care for most of it), the game has some great original music. Fits the mood well, whether it's the serious stuff, or the more action-y combat music.
And that's about it for Mafia III. I think, if you have the time, this is a game that you really should play. It's going to stick with me for a very, very long time. At its best, it's some of the best I've ever seen in a video game. At its worst, it's mediocre and a little boring. All that said, I think it's worth your time.
Thanks for reading!
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