It clearly thinks it's incisive psychological entertainment, though, and consequently pulls in sensitive material that, as Vinny said, it doesn't have the chops to pull off.
Also, most people visiting this site would be familiar with what, say, Hatred has to dish out. Tender Loving Care comes as an unknown quantity to most gamers, and it invokes pointedly specific trauma scenarios in protracted, ugly, sometimes sudden ways (I'm thinking of the radio calls here) in an approximation of a real-life setting, under the pretense of dealing with these issues in a mature manner but actually doing anything but. This makes it considerably different from most games the site covers, so I can understand a word of caution to the effect of "heads up if you don't want to deal with this stupid shit right now."
I killed time this weekend by reading the novel on which this game is based. I'll save detailed reactions for the next video due to spoilers, but - God help me, the game is actually a better and more nuanced portrayal of the story than the book. It's that bad.
Dan doesn't need to have a good reason for Persona 5 "not being for him". People should stop acting like he should have one. No one would force you to play a game you aren't interested in, or to explain yourself.
So I wonder: Is there a story variation where Mike isn't an asshole (and this is all GBE's fault) or is always like this? And was that sex scene at the end already at max nudity? Because it seemed like the guys weren't always picking the horniest answers, but that scene was maybe one second away from showing it.
I once did two runthroughs of the game, one where I answered naturally, and one where I answered the opposite of that (including horny answers). The big difference sexwise was that in (***spoiler alert***) later sex scenes, more was shown - the scenes would be extended to show breasts etc. where they'd just cut away before that in my normal playthrough. (I don't remember what, if any, differences there were to the scene we just saw, unfortunately.) There are other differences to how scenes run depending on certain questions - like, if you answer "no" to "Are girls smarter than boys?", Kathryn acts more deferent in the following scene, or (in a bizarre choice) if you answer questions about kids positively, you get to see more of the auto accident with the dead, bloodied child. The character behavior was largely the same, though. A few choice lines might be present or not present depending on the guys' answers, but I don't think there's a version where Mike's not a jerk.
Inspired by zaldar's comment, I went to see if the AV Club had done a Random Roles with John Hurt - and they had! But they didn't ask about this game. Dammit!
(I will plug again, though, that Geoff Keighley article on Trilobyte (source of the $100,000 quote for Hurt's salary), which gives the best account of how this game came to be.)
Is the guy at the office who keeps staring at Michael the same actor who played Stauf from The 7th Guest? He's supposed to have a cameo in this.
@indigozeal: Interesting. I wonder if the Wikipedia comment refers to a specific release (the first?) and it was fixed for the DVD.
Yeah, I'd considered a version issue myself; that's sure a possibility! The DVD was one of the first versions out, though; I don't believe it and the PC version were launched that far apart, and as described, it'd be tough for such a glitch to trigger for a lot of the stuff given the way some of its flags seem to work. I wish I knew from where Wikipedia is getting its info; I Googled around for details, but I didn't find anything.
I *did*, however, find a few oddities about the game in the process, including a number of positive reviews from old turn-of-the-millennium websites that really did regard it as a mature work of art. The '90s were a hell of a time. I also found an article on The Dissolve on the game, though, with developer comments.
There's also a big section on the making of the game in a Geoff Keighley history of Trilobyte; it goes on for several pages. (It says that John Hurt got $100,000 for his role, BTW, plus a $20,000 flight from Kenya.)
Finally: The guy at Trilobyte responsible for the game made a spiritual successor interactive movie entitled Point of View. I have no idea how much it's like Tender Loving Care, but - well, if we find ourselves needing more at the end here...
This interactivity is severely diminished due to a faulty implementation of the game's logic, so the user answers to questionnaires do not impact the relevant scene, but the next after that. As a result, the last questionnaire has no effect at all in the ending scene.
I'm not sure this is true. I played through the DVD version twice (once answering normally, once answering the exact opposite of that, with additional futzing around with some sections), and there were quizzes that did indeed affect the next scenes. For example, an answer of "Yes" to the "Are girls smarter than boys?" question had Kathryn act bossier toward Michael in the next scene; answering "No" had Kathryn act a bit deferent (with "Sometimes" getting what we saw, of course). An upcoming quiz about whether or not you like children triggers the presence of a certain scene in the following video segment, etc. I don't think what Wikipedia's proposing could be true, at least wholly, since there are certain questions that clearly do trigger certain specific scenes and aren't (solely) part of a cumulative score, so to speak.
(But the interactivity, as we all might guess, covers mainly the degree of nudity and come-ons you see.)
indigozeal's comments