(question) are the newer seasons worth playing?
hi. some quick backstory; i used to lurk this community a lot years back when s1 and s2 came out. twdg has a special place in my heart bc it got me into story- and character-driven games. however, i had a lot of... problems with s2 - many of which were brought up on this forum - in regards to the writing and the game design that caused my interest in the game series to dwindle. when s3 came out, i didn't even bother playing it. however, just the other day a video of the final season of twdg came up in my recommendations and i got so emo bc goddammit, i did love this series so much.
the main problems i had w s2 was the short length of the episodes and how the game pretty much removed all hubs, which made it hard to get to know the characters the way you did in s1 and (imo) consequently lessened the emotional impact of their deaths. i also thought the handling of some characters were downright disrespectful, with how they basically killed them off without finishing their respective character arcs. i've been so out of touch with the fandom, so i don't know if it got better in s3 or if it had the same issues. i heard that the final season has one of the s1 writers on board though, which made me optimistic.
basically, what i'm wondering is if any of these issues were adressed and fixed in s3 (or the first ep of s4) and if they're any good in a general sense. i'm not saying the new seasons have to have to be like the first season for me to consider playing them tho, as long as the writing and character arcs are solid i'm in
thankful for a response. cheers lads!
Comments
In season 3 those issues got much much worse, I would feel confident saying you would hate that game. But S4 E1 was a real return to form for Telltale, I was quite impressed and I went into the season ready to despise it.
Don't even bother playing 3.
If you didnt like season 2, you probably will hate season 3, episodes are shorter and the characters really lack development. I guess you can skip it I go straight for the final season. We also don’t have much hubs in season three.
Well Season 4 looks professing so far, the first episode was 2 hours and I liked the new characters. Plus the gameplay (more hubs, “free” combat and an over the shoulder camera) and graphics have improved A LOT.
Well season 3 was bad. But if you want to play this season with your choices you made in the previous seasons you'll need to buy the 3rd season in order to import your choices.
Don't even look at the cover art for ANF. Actually, forget I even brought up ***. Skip whatever game comes sequentially after season 2, and jump straight to the final season.
Avoid A*F at all times and you’ll be set
I think you'll be fine jumping into The Final Season, the first episode alone is worth more of your time/effort/cash than Season Two and A New Frontier.
Something tells me you'd be a welcome addition to these forums, at least IMO.
I mean, TFS is shaping up to be great. Personally I don't ANF is as bad as most people say it is. I thought it improved upon what Season 2 did really bad most of the time. Is it skippable? Yeah, it is, but it has its moments where it is cool.
This article may be helpful if you are considering TFS in the future and want to know about save files:
https://telltale.com/news/2018/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-importing-saves-to-the-walking-dead-the-final-season/
I liked season 3 during it's time but I recently played it again. I really don't like it that much anymore.
I hated A New Frontier while it came out, but I haven't replayed it since. I imagine it's a little less bad if you play all episodes at once and don't have to wait three months for a new episode, but I still wouldn't recommend it. It's a confusing mess of terrible writing and characters, countless rewrites, short episodes, meaningless choices and does a real disservice to Clementine and AJ.
The Final Season on the other hand is shaping up to be great, in my opinion it's already better than the mediocre Season 2 and the terrible Season 3/ANF. First episode was really good, I wholeheartedly recommend it if you enjoyed Season 1 and want a similar Lee/Clem dynamic between Clem/AJ.
DONT PLAY A NEW FRONTIER,BRUH
,since anf was already the third season,but its more of a terrible spin off side story type shit
Trust me,if you played S1 and S2 u arent missing out on ANYTHING story wise by skippin that garbage,it didnt focus on the main character of the series anyway,Playing S1,2 and then the final season is just fine
the only reason they didnt call the final season,season 3 is that it would have been confusing
You all can hate on ANF all you like, but don’t go hating on Javier just because he wasn’t Clementine.
Skip new frontier and come join us in season 4, it's so much better and you wouldn't miss out on anything.
Oh no, it’s even worse than I remembered it. I went back and played it all recently, I’m doing this long ANF review series for my YutTube channel, and it’s much worse than I originally thought. Playing it in essentially one go just makes you more aware of all the problems with it.
its trash,that gay ass David "i love u scene" was and pretty cool tho,the only thing i can remember about ANF that was any good,apart from some flashbacks
I liked Season 2, but I despised ANF, so I’d imagine that if you already hated Season 2, you will vehemently loathe ANF. Episodes got even shorter, there are even less hubs, and characters dying/disappearing without satisfying ends to their arcs feels like a common occurrence throughout the game.
Eh. At that point, David was just pissing me off and getting on my nerves due to his inconsistent character that I just didn’t care anymore.
yeah,but especially compared to the rest of the game,thats some pretty good shit
I love you scene? Forget that, I optioned to kick his ass.
i wanted to kick his ass too,but i play the game as more of a "director" type shit
a fight scene is a fight scene,the game was already trash with not a single interesting scene
so that shit was better
i know a good ass scene when i see one (even if everything around it was still trash including the characters,the music was dope)
seems like 60 somethin % of the people did too
I guess it's all up to personal feelings. I played season 1 and 2, and I'm glad I did. But never played Season 3, and don't plan on it. I watched it on Youtube because it didn't appeal to me. I am going to play Season 4 however, so. If you think it looks interesting, you play the seasons you want and feel are worth it.
Hey! I've seen your reaction to the official trailer for TFS! Nice video btw.
Thank you.
...damn. all the comments are cracking me tf up bc it's just a collective slamming of s3 lol. is it really that bad? a part of me feels tempted to play it just to see for myself
i'm reeeeally paranoid about missing out on stuff though. how long is the s3 in-game time span?
from the replies i can gather that pretty much all the side characters introduced in s3 are killed off in the same season, so i don't really care about them, but i feel like it's gonna be harder for me to connect to clem and aj if i don't know what they went through, y'know?
Same here, on my replay of the collection I was ready to be done with ANF. I had already replayed it 3-4x prior to the release of TFS over the last year alone. I completed Finish the Gallows like 15 minutes before E1 of TFS released. I was pretty spent at that point but as soon as I started E1 of TFS, all the things that I came to despise ANF for during my final play, went out the window.
Only flaw with E1 of TFS is that it still felt kind of short.
does a real disservice to Clementine and AJ
tbh this is the only thing that has the potential to turn me off from playing s3. idk if i should've included this in my original post or not but i actually have the game, i just haven't played it lmao. i bought it on sale, but i've never touched it since then. if it totally butchers clem's character then i really don't wanna play it. can you develop on what you mean by disservice? do they make her act out-of-character? i realize that clem's kind of a tabula rasa and she's what you've made her to be, but still.
Hey, don't question the will of the overlords that represent the unthinking majority of this community! They won't heart your post.
Based off of the first episode of TFS, you will literally miss out on nothing if you don't play ANF (I refuse to call it S3, it is not S3). There's one tiny mention, but even that was downplayed in ANF so much that, even if you don't play it, nothing will change. It would be funny if it wasn't so infuriating.
Like 4 days, I'm not even joking. The entire season takes place over the span of 4 days, yet all the characters act like they've known each other their entire lives, or act shock when something is revealed about a character they just met. You don't notice that on your first play through, but on repeat ones, it's glaringly evident.
Pff five and a half hours tops? Which is pathetic seeing as TFS's first episode alone is 3 hours long... You honestly wouldn't miss out on much although it has a couple of nice Clem scenes here and there.
Well, for starters, you only play as Clementine in flashbacks. They make up about 5% of the game if I had to guess. She's in the present day storyline, but you can only interact with her as Javier, and the relationship feels really forced because they act like best buddies 10 minutes after meeting. Javier is a completely blank slate, which is both good and bad.
AJ isn't in the main storyline at all, and Clementine is turned into an angsty, edgy 13 year old stereotype. It's...really bad. Like, really bad. You can barely recognize her as the character you met and shaped in the first two Seasons. And lastly, even though I love Melissa Hutchison, not even the voice acting is all that good. It's ok, but not on her usual level. ANF isn't worth playing in my opinion, especially if you're only interested in the Clementine parts. You're not missing out. If you just start up TFS, there's a small "story builder" segment in which you can select some choices and it gives all the information and context you need for ANF in my opinion.
But like I said, The Final Season is really good so far, I definitely recommend it. The real Clementine is back and I love the dynamic between her and AJ.
Her entire inclusion of the game is inconsequential and pointless. Seriously, if you remove her, nothing of importance is lost and nothing would change. I'm a big time fan of Clem (look at my Gravatar, it's Clementine wearing a Metallica shirt, she's my favorite character in all of fiction), but I have no problem in saying the game might have actually been better had the writers decided to not put her in the game at all. She's relegated to a side character that season, if that, and her character really doesn't go through any arc, and if it did, it ends without a concrete conclusion to the point where you can jump right into TFS and nothing of value would be lost. They essentially turned the face of the franchise into a cheap marketing ploy to give the game some legitimacy among fans. Basically, Telltale said "Look, Clem is in the game, so even though it's really about this new character and his family, it also acts as a continuation," when really, it doesn't.
Our choices from Season 2, including the endings, do little to nothing in impacting Clem's character across the season, she acts pretty much the same regardless of what you do, with a couple of dialogue changes. The most obvious change to her character is a physical alteration based on the ending you had from Season 2, that's it, and no matter what it is, it's tiny and never brought up. She acts the same regardless of anything you did before, which is very odd considering how the timeline works in some of the ending resolutions (Big Spoiler Ahead, don't read if you don't want to know: She survives with Kenny for nearly two years and is on her own with AJ for less than a month, but her entire jaded outlook and views are the exact same as if you had her be alone for two years, or if she went with Jane and was on her own for a little over a year, or if she was in Wellington the entire time). Telltale said there were 42 different variations of Clem that players have crafted across the 2 seasons, but we never really see them. And again, as a huge Clem fan, and as someone who made her into a caring and compassionate person who stuck by the people she cared about, she just becomes an edgy, cynical badass trope character. She apparently goes through some growth, but it's poorly executed and you don't understand how Clem came to her conclusion. Like seriously, one minute it seems like she's distant and wants nothing to do with them, then she's hanging around them all the time and wants to help them, it's really weird.
If you have any other questions, I'm here to help.
Please explain how Javier is a good character. He's not as terrible as the side characters and I like that he's a completely blank slate, but that comes at the cost of him just being intensely boring. We learned a lot about Lee over the course of Season 1 and built a real connection to him, and we already got to know Clementine by the time Season 2 came out, so we knew a lot about her character.
While those two are actual characters, Javier is just a stand-in for the audience and it couldn't be more obvious. But not in a good way.
He meets Clementine when she's pointing a gun at his back and is best buddies with her by the end of the episode.
Why? Because Javier is supposed to represent us as the players and isn't just a predefined character that we control, and that never worked for me in a story heavy game. It's good for RPGs, but not for a Telltale game.
Other than ANF, it's hard to rank them. I guess this is how I would so far:
I'd skip 3 (the one that shall not be named). It doesn't really add anything to the plot and you can pretty much just look up the Season 2 endings for closure if need be. However Season 4, is most definitely worth playing. It brings back, character development, the pacing is great and it overall feels like a true sequel to the first.
yes
Thats a nice list,i would have ranked em the same way
.
For me is actually my
That makes me hate what they did to her in ANF even more,who the fuck was that bitch? i def dont know er
Like wtf,do I actually know the character better than the writers of that game,Clems always been badass sure,but there are plenty of standard badass bitches around already,Clem was much more "complex" and shit like that,its hard to explain but wtf,anyone who played S2 knows
TFS is kinda like ANF Clem + some S2 shit mixed in there too
shes nice,too early fo me to tell tho
Javier is honestly my favorite protagonist of the series.
I liked ANF. I’d rank it third among the three full seasons, but that’s only because the first two seasons were just better. Not ANF being bad.
Season 3 is worth it for Clem's character development and her flashbacks.
Think of it as anime filler.
it's informative (and cool) to see Clem during her interim period as a non-protagonist.
i feel like jumping from S2 to S4 is way too jarring. You don't get any idea of of Clem's growth as a human being at all.
Clem is 11 in S2, and essentially a 17-year old adult single mother in S4. They're basically two different people and if you skip S3 you don''t catch any of the nuances of that comes with maturity. (anyone from age 11 to 17 is basically a different person).
in retrospect, the short, rushed length of ANF is a silver lining.
It's the easiest season to blaze through and there's nothing to think much of it throughout.