And perhaps that those non-police related missions aren't in there is more about scope than artistic choice. To let people play as gumshoe knock-off from a Chandler or Hammett novel instead of a deeply troubled character, allowing them to go on murderous rampages across LA or do side quests like fetching things for movie starlets when they're not solving cases or stopping muggings. Noire to loosely adopt the mantras of its influences and not lovingly live by them. It would have been enough, and perhaps financial boon, for L.A. Instead, Team Bondi wisely trusts the player to make their own judgements of who Cole Phelps is. Whether he succeeds is up to the player and not in the sense that the player can make Phelps' do things that result in society's view of him at the end of the game. However, from this arc Phelps eventually emerges as someone who's actually looking for redemption and is willing (and does) pay a high cost to try and earn it. This twist changes Phelps from a Sam Spade type – grizzled but honorable – to someone who's just a fumbling coward putting on a big show during the course of the game. Revelations of his time as a soldier during World War II reveal that Phelps is not only a coward, but that he ended up getting countless civilians killed during the Battle of Okinawa. He is not a the typical good man 'brought low' by the vices of Hollywood, by women, by booze, by drugs. The story of Cole Phelps isn't the story of other similar protagonists in the noir genre. He's a dullard, a hypocrite, a sham of a war veteran, a sham of a person. Let's be plain about it: Cole Phelps kind of sucks. This is a bold move made even bolder by just how unlikeable the character is. Team Bondi forces its players to abide by the rules of the experience it created, respecting the player enough to trust them to rein in their id and become Cole Phelps. You can't mow down civilians with machine-gun fire or rough up suspects just because you want to. Noire refuses to let its players go off the rails. Except for the likes of Nier: Automata and Dark Souls, there is perhaps no AAA game I've ever played that makes such stiff demands of its player in the pursuit of artistic vision and is unapologetic about it.ĭespite being published by Rockstar and sharing many qualities with Grand Theft Auto, L.A. Noire, which is ridiculously long, and found myself falling in love with all the qualities I had hated years earlier. I'd solve a single case, put down the game for today in order to play something else or do my studies, and then come back to it later. Noire's focus on presenting missions as cases makes this particularly easy. What else am I going to do?įor my replay, I took my time with the game instead of trying to blast through it in a week. I've even started writing about games on the internet for some reason (because I'm a fool). I've become a much more patient person and have started playing games that fall out of the shooter/action/RPG mold. But for 21-year old me, who craved shooting digital bad guy after bad guy, I found the whole experience to be pretty dull and disappointing. That said, I did fall in love with exploring Bondi's presentation of the infamous city, examining everyone and their routines, and soaking in the atmosphere. And I especially didn't like protagonist Cole Phelps, an unlikeable boy scout-type drowning in self-righteousness. I didn't like that I couldn't run over pedestrians or the skew toward detective work over shooting. I distinctly remember not liking the game at all my first time through. My brother and I went 50/50 on a copy of Team Bondi's ambitious open-world game and then spent a week playing through it. I was just starting to dip my toe back into video games after being away for years.
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