What Really Made ANF So Bad, Relative To The Other Seasons?
To me, there seems to be a very overwhelming consensus in the Walking Dead community that ANF is the black sheep of the franchise. It also seems to me that so far the Final Season is overwhelmingly liked, especially relative to ANF. I just recently finished playing ANF, just to pass the time, and I can definitely confirm that ANF is definitely the worst; even as far as the entirety of it being worse than the first episode of the final season. To be more concrete, I'd give the first season a 9/10, the second a 7.5/10, and ANF a 5/10. Those are just my quick subjective scores based on my impressions and opinions; not matters of fact. I won't give the Final Season a true rating yet, as it hasn't really had time to realize itself yet. Though I suppose if Telltale makes the following episodes as good as the first one or better, it's probably in the Ballpark of an 8/10-8.5/10. I'm generally not a super generous scorer.
So, as an honest question, what aspects of ANF made it so much worse compared to the other seasons? Even though I don't think the second season was as even close as good to the first season, it was still decently solid.
I'll start off and give my perspective. To me, an analogy would be that ANF felt more like a modern CGI cash-grab Hollywood film, while Season 1 and Season 2 felt more like indies or older style movies. In older films, the stories typically had a slower pace, more meaningful better-written dialogue between characters, more developed and complex character arcs, and usually a better story. While all of the characters could still fit into some timeless archetype (the tragic hero, the comic relief, etc.) as well as the story (the quest, tragedy, rebirth, etc), the characters and story were far more than that. In those days, without the advent of CGI, a revolutionary technology which has been abused to create a bunch of mediocre but highly profitable superficial junk, good writing was paramount for a movie to be successful.
To me, unfortunately, ANF seemed to go down the modern Hollywood route. There was a plentiful amount of very fast-paced physical action that was superficially visually entertaining; however, we got a very unoriginal revenge and rebirth plot, and a bunch of cliched subplots and tropes: the brother-brother love triangle, the friend-who-becomes-a-traitor, the immature, coming-of-age teenager, the dumb muscleman, the brother-is-actually-the-villain, etc. In sum, I felt like I watched a poorly-written but mildly amusing telenovela.
In contrast, I felt like the first two seasons went down more the older film / indie route. Both stories were significantly slower-paced than ANF was, and spent much more time developing the characters they presented through interactions between each other and the protagonist. Although most of the characters could have been fitted into some archetype (especially S2's), they generally had much more depth to them beyond that basic form. In addition, although both didn't have that much action, the action they did have was generally much more purposeful and well-executed. In about all aspects that I have previously mentioned, I would say Season 1 outperformed Season 2, but I still think Season 2 is closer in rating to Season 1 than it is to ANF. To be a little bit more concrete, who are you going to remember more? Ben or Gabe? Carver or Joan? Kenny or David? Duck or Mariana? Lee or Javier?
So, what do you think made ANF so bad, relative to the other seasons? The reason I'm bringing this up is with the goal of abstracting some of the general faults of ANF so that TFS doesn't go down the same road. As it stands, it seems more like it is going down the older film/indie route, but it still has a few more episodes to go.
Comments
The fact that they did 2 seasons where Clementine was the main focus and then actually told us the premiere was
"too big" for one episode which was a complete lie. They destroyed our season 2 endings in a 5 minute flashback sequence. They made Clem a minor character and told us there were a ton of variations of Clementines. The episodes are short, the plot is awful, and the characters are bland. The only cool thing they did with ANF was make a determinant character survive the entire season.
I suppose the main culprits would be characters and length. Story/plot is undoubtedly important too, but generally speaking, stories like TWD are character-driven, where good characters can potentially save a mediocre plot/story. That tends to happen pretty often in film and the like, right?
Problem is, ANF's characters don't make up for the lackluster plot of the season; there's simply not enough substance to them. Take Tripp. I still really like that guy, he has some funny lines and cool scenes... but ask yourself this: what's the most notable thing he does? Chances are it's difficult to answer that question, because he basically did nothing. He didn't have any character arc, he didn't undergo some major change, he didn't provide much relevance to the plot itself... yet this guy is practically a main character of the season, being able to stick around for all five episodes. Even Conrad, the guy that can die all the way back in episode 2 arguably has more bearing and impact on the plot than Tripp does. For the sake of comparison, the equivalents to Tripp in the first two seasons were Kenny and Luke respectively. Tripp is without a doubt the weakest of these 'anchor' characters as I personally like to call them.
And Tripp's not the only one that suffers this. Eleanor... exists. She helps Kate in episode 2, then betrays you in episode 4, but beyond that she barely has relevance as a character. Not to mention her suddenly being incredibly nice to Javier like 2 minutes after meeting him... just after he was involved in some guy getting shot in the face.
Gabe is practically the antithesis of S1 Clementine. Both are child characters, with a strong established bond between them and the playable character, and the player is expected (and obligated) to care for them. The problem is, Clementine is given endearing qualities that both ground her as a character, while also giving the player incentive to actually care about her. Gabe is a moody teenager, who is constantly complaining or whining about something, spouting all the "I wanna be a man" nonsense, and in episodes 4 and 5, he starts flip flopping between being a little shit (like telling everyone about Conrad), and actually having moments of introspection where he acknowledges his mistakes. But they're disjointed and seem to happen out of the blue; Gabe tells everyone about Conrad's death, but in the immediate next scene after the loading screen, he can suddenly admit that he was wrong to say that and tries to apologize, but it comes across too awkward since it happens so quickly. The real shame is that it seems like the writers finally figured out what they wanted to do with him in episode 5, since he seemed to actually gain direction as a character... but the damage was pretty much done by then. Most people already vehemently hated him by this point, so much so that a couple endearing scenes where he finally acknowledges Javier's attempts to care for him just end up falling flat.
Clementine is relegated to the sidelines, as well as more or less railroaded in terms of her personality. She gets quite cold and harsh in ANF regardless of how you played her before. Sure, she gets a few different scenes/lines, but many of her major actions in the story always happen: holding Javi at gunpoint and threatening him, shooting Eli, staying behind to fight at the junkyard, wanting to kill David and Lingard, and so forth. She starts showing a pretty callous disregard for human life, and it makes sense to some degree; she thinks AJ's dead, and she largely blames David and the New Frontier for his death and shows no mercy towards them. But you'd expect her to be at least somewhat sympathetic. Like, take Dr. Lingard. He really didn't do anything bad towards Clementine or AJ. He didn't snitch on her about using the medicine, he spoke up and wanted to give her a second chance after she was caught stealing, and looks noticeably sad when David has AJ taken away. The worst he did was stop treating AJ because he thought it was hopeless, which might sound cold, but it's not like he didn't try at all. He was a part of what happened, sure, but he was obviously reluctant about it. But despite that, Clementine couldn't give two hoots about him and is totally fine with wanting to kill him herself. Hating David to the extent of wanting him to die makes sense, but not Lingard.
You have Badger, who is easily the worst bad guy yet, and not in a good way. He's just evil. There's not even an attempt to add any complexity to him, he's just an asshole. And he's basically treated as nothing more than a revenge fantasy in the end.
And then we have Joan, the antagonist that goes from potentially being interesting to just being a flat-out maniac. The end of episode 3 seems to establish her as actually having some kind of motive; one of those 'ends justify the means' type of person. But then that just gets forgotten in episode 4 when she suddenly decides to publicly execute David, then plays mind games with Javier and has a second person executed in front of the entire town. People give Carver shit about having a character shift between episodes 2 and 3. But man oh man, Joan is on an entirely different level in this regard.
You also have Max, and credit where it's due, it's nice to have a 'bad guy' that falls in the grey area. The problem with Max is that he literally disappears after episode 3. No kind of resolution to his character whatsoever, he just disappears from the story, and the only reason we know what happened to him is because a developer talked about it during a Q&A.
The rest of the Garcia family was handled good enough (despite the lack of a solid character arc and all that), Conrad was one of the few characters that actually went through a character arc (one that depends on the player sparing him in episode 2, nonetheless), and there were a few interesting but underutilized characters sprinkled throughout the season (namely thinking of Lingard, Ava, Max and Tripp here). But beyond that, the cast is more or less forgettable and/or one-note.
This post has already gone on way longer than I was expecting and I've been typing for I don't even know how long, so I'll just quickly cover the length with the following statement: it's too short. The only episode with a decent length (or to be more specific, the only episode that utilizes every minute of its run-time) is the third episode. Episode 2 is far too short for it's own good, episode 4 is mostly filler leading up to the final 15 minutes, and episode 5 is a relatively rushed conclusion to a story that feels like it's only made it to the second or third act. And episode 1... well, episode 1 has the Kenny/Jane flashbacks.
If ANF episodes were given a longer run-time, and the developers were given more time/freedom/resources to properly nail down a proper story arc for the overall plot as well as the characters, it could have turned out quite well. Or if they just didn't rewrite the entire story from the ground up like 4 or 5 months before the release. Either one would have worked in the game's favor.
With all that being said though, I still don't completely hate ANF like other people here do. It's undoubtedly the weakest entry to the series thus far, but I don't think it is entirely without positive aspects. But I can also admit that many things could have (and should have) been handled way better than they were. And if I'm being honest, the people I'd put a lion's share of the blame on regarding ANF's troubled development are no longer part of the company, or have otherwise seemingly improved and learned from their mistakes (the lead writer for episode 5 was a co-writer for episode 1 of TFS, which a lot of people really like and some consider one of the series's best episodes overall).
I'm far too generous when it comes to giving scores to stuff, but if you made me give an overall to ANF, I'd probably settle on... 7/10? Maybe even 6.5 if I was feeling cynical enough. I have low standards and I don't make any attempts to hide that, but considering I'd also put the first two seasons both within the 9-10 range, it's definitely still a notable drop. And believe it or not, my two favorite episodes from ANF were episodes 3 and 5. Yeah, I'm one of the few people here that liked 5. It had problems, but that's standard fare for the season overall. I felt it at least delivered a solid ending. Eh, unless you get the one ending where David dies off screen, I guess. That one is weak, but the other variants have at least some emotional gravitas to them, even if only slightly for some people. I'll say that David's on screen death and Gabe's death were both actually sad to me. They made me feel something. Hell, finding walker Kate if you get the David + Gabe ending (which in my totally unbiased opinion is the best one) made me feel something, too. And I can at least give the episode credit for that. Oh, and the fact that a determinant character finally survived the entire season. I've wanted this shit since Carley/Doug and Ben. It only took like 5 years but GOD DAMN IT I finally got my wish.
And as for episode 3, I personally feel it was the most consistently good episode. A lot of people give ANF shit for being too action oriented, but episode 3 easily has the least amount of action and set pieces. It's largely character driven, and a majority of the interactions and character motivations here make sense and actually flow (save for the Clem flashback, and the "reasoning" for kicking Clem out but keeping AJ). You also see Conrad go through an actual character arc in this episode as well as have an actual role if you kept him alive, you get one of the only notably brutal and gory scenes of the season, and you get some potentially interesting plot points or character relationships set up (even though a lot of them are not followed through in the remaining episodes). To sum it up, how I feel about episode 3 is probably how most people feel about episode 4.
I'm sort of in the middle of tackling many of the problems I and many others had with ANF in a series of videos on my YouTube channel. Along with a small intro video discussing the production and history of the game, each video looks at each individual episode, analyzing some of the problems and critiquing certain elements. Feel free to watch if you've got the time. I just released Episode 4's video today and have already started Episode 5's.
Here's a link to the playlist.
Thanks for taking the time to write out all of that. You probably have some of the best writing that I've seen on the forum and you take a lot of time to really address points in great depth. You did a really good job of covering almost all of the characters in much greater detail while I just glossed over general differences and patterns that I saw. I pretty much agree with your argument on the whole (the characters and the length were both problematic). That being said, I'd like to expand upon a few things that you mentioned.
Taking into the context that you basically covered faults with Gabe's character in great detail, I think there are a few other missed opportunities with the rest of the Garcia family. Take Mariana's very limited arc in the first episode of ANF. I think a decent comparison to Mariana is Duck from Season 1. Duck doesn't particularly play a major role in advancing the plot nor is he a major character; he is not even a particularly well-liked character. However, the game sets you up to develop a bond with him in a fairly organic way: you have to choose to save him on Hershel's farm, where he is being grabbed by a walker or Shaun whose stuck under the tractor; you can choose to defend him or throw him out in the Drugstore; he acts as a similar-aged friend to Clementine; you save him from Andy St. John who has a gun pointed to his head on the St Johns' Farm; you solve a mystery with him to find out where the missing drugs are going and finally you have to get Kenny to stop the train through persuasion or physical force to finally have you or Kenny put Duck out before he turns, or to let him turn. Season 1 makes you do several actions that allow you to develop a decent bond with Duck, even if you don't particularly like him. All of that I think makes his inevitable death legitimately depressing. In contrast, in ANF, there are practically no actions that actually involve Mariana, other than rescuing your family, so when she is killed by Badger, although it is quite shocking and saddening in the immediate moment, it has nowhere near the emotional depth that Duck's death does because of how little you really do anything with her. The only real reason the death has any real feeling at all is that the very little shallow character that she does have was likeable. If it had been Gabe instead, I think some people might have actually been "thank god I don't have to listen to him anymore" or would have found it morbidly funny. The way she actually dies -- getting shot, freeze frames into a corpse position, and falls -- looks ridiculous and cartoonish. While her death still functioned well enough as a motivator for Javier's revenge against Badger, she had too short an existence for it to bear the emotional significance that Ducks's did. I think Kate and David were both managed decently well, and play enough of a role in the story to have not been complete throwouts. They are probably the two most developed characters in the story, other than Clementine, developed from her previous two seasons, and Javier, the protagonist.
This is certainly true if you spared him in episode 2. However, the problem is that they set up that situation terribly, and the player stats showed it (~5-6% spared him, which is astronomically low for any decision; I would consider a decision ranging from a 50/50 to a 60/40 split a decently implemented one). The game forces you to decide between protecting Clementine, which the players likely have an emotional attachment to after having been with her for two seasons, or siding with Conrad, who blames you for Francine's death and the destruction of Prescott fairly recently earlier in the same episode, and reduces Clementine to a thing to be traded. I find it decently hard to believe most people could relegate Clementine to just a trading token, on top of Conrad looking visibly crazy when you are forced to make the final decision. If the game still wanted to make Conrad practically determinant throughout the entire season, I think a better approach might have been making it whether he survived the inside of the train tunnel dependent on whether or not you convinced Gabe to shoot at Conrad's feet or to put the gun down. If Gabe put the gun down, he saves Conrad from dying in the train tunnel, and if you didn't convince him, Gabe is unable to or refuses to help save Conrad. Somewhat similar to how Conrad's life in the third episode depended on whether you gave him the gun or not.
You definitely hit the nail on the head here. I definitely agree Clementine is way too cold, especially with some of the ways you could have developed her character in Season 1 and Season 2. While I do think her being as cold and harsh as she was could certainly be justified depending on a number of choices Lee made in Season 1 while serving as a mentor for her, as well as the ones she personally made in Season 2, I also think alternative choices potentially made would plausibly result in her being almost the complete opposite temperament. While I do realize that the developers cannot realistically make a humungous number of temperaments for Clementine, I think instead of 1, they could have made maybe 4 or so: a needlessly cruel Clementine, an almost naively compassionate Clementine, a pragmatic Clementine, a loyal Clementine, etc. Another issue I have is that Clementine barely gets any additional character development in ANF. In my opinion, you could cut out ANF from her story arc of the entire series, and you would lose nothing from it, other than a few jokes.
I generally agree with your assessment of Badger: a revenge fantasy with no redeemable qualities. I do think though you can incorporate characters who are just pure evil and still have them stick. The problem with Badger in particular I think, is not that he has nothing morally redeemable about him, but rather there's nothing interesting at all about him. He doesn't have any particularly clever schemes. He's not cunning or highly intelligent. He's just a basic stereotypical savage brute. I think a good example of a bad guy who doesn't really have anything redeeming about them and is basically pure evil would be Littlefinger from Game of Thrones. He is a master of manipulation for just his own gain and has nothing really good inside him, but is still very interesting. If we had gotten a villain more like that, I would've been satisfied.
Once more, I also believe Joan was a poorly done main antagonist that could have been quite great. The first biggest problem I had with Joan is that you are immediately put at odds with her, rather than developing a more gradual tension with her that eventually results in the inevitable climax with her. I think a better set up with her would have been that you are introduced to her, as well as her talking about her "the end justifies the means" belief, then being given some time to acclimate to the New Frontier, while getting a better sense of what's good and bad about it, and then perhaps by the end of the episode either being forced out because you either directly criticize her methods to her face or accuse her of the Mariana incident, and/or not being able to find a way to cover up the gas/murder incident, or another possibility being you keep the Mariana incident to yourself, and you managed to cover up the gas/murder incident and begin a plan inside to overthrow her power structure while still being able to remain inside the New Frontier. Both of those endings would have set up the further episodes much better, as well as Joan's character.
Now, my post is getting ridiculously long, so I'll end it here, but overall, I do think ANF was not necessarily doomed from the very start and could have been either saved by better character development or a more tightly-controlled story, but failed to manage to do either of those, as you have also pointed out in great detail.
Short game.
Bland characters no one cares about.
Kenny death.
Clementine' s hair for a from black to brown somehow.
A lot of choices don't matter ex. Tripp and Ava die no matter what choice you make
The fact that its meant to be a sequel but follows completely new characters and doesn't continue off S2 and having the main focus of the series have only a side plot to the story which I was way much more interested and invested in.
But clem got her period. Cringing out of existence
Plot is a mess, most characters are very uninteresting/unlikeable, most characters were completely wasted, handling of determinant characters was absolute dog manure, no impactful choices, Clementine reduced to a side-character, ridiculous and complete utter shit lazy wrap-ups for all the S2 endings, short episode lengths, numerous rewrites, bipolar character development, lies, lies and LIES.
ANF was an undeveloped not thought out, horribly rushed mess of a game. I'm so glad bitch ass Bruner and his douchebag ilk have been purged from Telltale. They were nothing short of cancer to the company, and Done Running goes to how much better they're doing in spite of them
I'll probably have to come back when i get the time, but there's a number of [legitimate] things.
I'll try to avoid the over stressed and/or accentuated stuff if I can/will.
The funny thing is, that the lead-writer for episode 3 is now the season lead writer for the final season and was the season lead writer for Batman S2.
Well, to be fair, I would say episode 3 was probably the least bad of ANF and Batman 2 was fairly solid. I guess that's a good sign for TFS future then?
To answer in some of the OP's questions I skimmed:
In terms of "fucking up?" Definitely Ben.
Joan. Carver is one of the most obvious stock...anything I've seen, while Joan's design, motivations, and sharp contrast with her most of underlings is very striking.
They kinda blur a bit out of context, but Kenny.
David ironically has the problem of being very non-distinct visually, never mind being a blatant clone of the former.
Duck, for obvious reasons.
Unless you mean design-wise, in which it'd be Mariana.
Lee. Grounded middle-aged black man from Season 1 kinda has an edge over Heroic twenty year old jock except Cuban and with a beard.
But during ANF’s development Telltale was going through serious workplace and management issues, so that very likely constricted his ability to do his best job. TFS definitely shows that he’s a talented writer.
To be honest, I didn't think Season 3 was all that bad. I mean its definetely the worst out of all the seasons but overall it was kind of enjoyable. However i do see the problems and yeah I hate them too.
The Romance. I REALLY HATE ROMANCE IN SERIOUS STORIES. I get that you need to have some light hearted stuff in dark stories. I dont mind them if they're executed right and not forced. Clem x Gabe, forced as hell. I mean its a little cute but its still forced. I would like some more development of Gabe's character because he was one of the reasons why I couldn't get into this ship. But this ship is not as worse as Kate x Javi. Again FORCED AS HELL. The whole thing felt one sided since it was only Kate pushing it. Like you really think I'm going to let Javi get with you when you're married, and too his brother. That's so direspectful. The relationship felt forced and out of nowhere. Again I don't mind romance but it has to be done right and not like the main center of the story (unless its obviously a romance story but this is the Walking Dead). Hopefully Season 4 doesn't turn into this considering that it looks to have a Teen Love Triangle (Ugh....I really hate Teen Romance Drama)
Family Drama. Okay so I mentioned im my previous reason but I was not into the Family Drama plot. David and Kate arguing so Javi is pulled into it. Then David wants me to watch his family to just live in the war days again. When he comes back, and don't forget he said watch after his family because he wants to be an army person again, he gets mad when Kate and Javi were super close (you can decide if you want them to be together) like what?! Kate wasn't making the situation any better (lets not forget Episode 5 when she put you on the spot at the worst possible time)
ANF had a lot of problems but there were some good things. Like Jesus and some action pack scenes (Killing Badger was so satisfying) and they also made your choices matter.
I rate ANF 6/10. Okay Season but could have been better. Definetely worse of of all of them
Edit** I meant to put "I guess they handle the 'your choices matter' thing better than the previous seasons"
As far as I myself am concerned, I trust that guy. I liked Above The Law, I liked his work with Batman S2, and if he's the lead writer for TFS, that likely means he's one of the main people responsible for writing an outline/roadmap for the overall season. If that is indeed the case, then I think he's probably the most qualified person for the job. If it were up to me, I'd have had him be lead writer for episodes 4 and 5 of ANF too. He managed to take episode 3 in a relatively interesting direction, and was able to salvage some of the problems presented by the first two episodes. If he was able to continue what he was trying to set up in the third episode, I think things would have panned out better.
Like the others said
It's too short
They butchered our season 2 endings and ruined Kenny and Jane
ANF's writing in a nutshell "What can i say ? I fucking love pudding."
Gabentine
And the worst thing about all this..
THE LIES
The only thing i liked in that game,was Jesus,i'm a huge fan of Jesus from the comics (that Garrus Vakarian's voice hmm) and also Conrad.
I think you misunderstood. I LOVE James Windelers work at Telltale. I just find it funny, that he was one of the writers who replaced the original team of ANF. After ANF, he went on to lead-write arguably the best second season of any modern telltale game and probably even one of the best seasons, period, with Batman: The Enemy Within and then returned to TWD as the lead writer for the final season.
That guy's got serious talent and Telltale seems to realize that.
the fact da other 2 seasons were so good actually what made it so bad
on its own just mediocre
Absolutely. I already saw some structural similarities between his work on Batman: The Enemy Within and The Walking Dead: The Final Season. Both seasons start off relatively slow, but both set-up some important plotpoints, characters, motivations and conflicts pretty early on. Some are pretty small, but will potentially grow big in the next episodes.
Like Tiffany in Batman. She appears in only, like, two scenes in the first episode, but becomes really important later on and I think the same thing will happen with Tenn in The Walking Dead, which has already been confirmed.
The thing I like about his writing so far is, that he takes his time to set-up and build-up potential plotpoints, storylines, characters and character-motivations fairly early on. You can even see that a bit in Above the Law, with how he sets-up the leaders for the new frontier or even the hirachy itself, even though it created some logic and continuity errors with concepts and rules established in the first two episodes. Sadly, he wasn't involved with the later episodes so he couldn't finish off the story.
One big issue with ANF is the fact that Telltale Oversimplified the Production.
A New Frontier was just the worst writing Telltale has done, there are so many holes in the plot that it may as well be a cheese grater.
Ohhh boy.
ANF is not a horrible game...however it had several things stacked against it from the start.
It was simply
rushed
Conrad for life
Honestly I liked the season a lot. Yes the overall plot was the weak, yes it was clearly rushed, yes they tossed our S2 endings out the window, probably for no other reason than to rush out Ep 1 before Christmas. but what carried it through for me was the dialogue and voice acting. Both, in my humble opinion, werd fantastic. Just listening to the characters conversate was the absolute highlight of the season for me, and I found myself caring for the characters MUCH more than in S2. If I never see the Garcias again I'm going to be very disappointed and upset, I care more about them than I have most people from the entire series. But I mean I teared up during Michonne so what do I know?
Actually they kind of did. When Javi is sneaking around Richmond, he comes across two guards and they’re talking about Javi. One of the guards mentioned that he was a shortstop for Baltimore, implying he played for the Baltimore Orioles, or was in their farm system.
That makes no sense....that's not a real team!! Ok maybe.
Nah, the Baltimore Orioles are a real baseball team. The only problem is that Javier's jersey does not use their colors (black, orange, white). Javier's jersey uses the colors of a baseball team in Florida, however; the Tampa Bay Rays.
Javier was originally from Florida, but that got changed to Baltimore at some point during the rewrites. I'm guessing they probably didn't bother changing his jersey to reflect the change.
Well, no wonder he sometimes says crazy shit.
Interesting to know regardless.
Well that and it'd look rather edgy next to the other characters.
I was just about to post how lame eps 3 & 4 are, as I'm playing thru this now before TFS. Ya hit the nail on the head with superficial Hollywood CGI. No one, save for Clementine, has any kind of depth at all.
And... Like the "confronting Joan" church sequence. Colors are downright beautiful, a lovely stained glass gradient, but the actual content is snore-worthy awful.
To add to the discussion: this season is a chore to slog thru. Hell, so much of ep 3 was on rails, dialogue only, that half the time I'd forget I was playing, choose silent option, and focus on multitasking with social media, or pvz2. That's when ya know how little Javi actually affects the plot, I guess. Silence is golden.
Main complaints tho? No characters really change. David is eternally the Asshole in a Bad Mood, Gabe is a whiny lil shit, and the scenes with Clem are far too short. Joan is a one note crazy, and Tripp? Betrays you for no reason.
I just can't wait to be done with this mess of a season, get the trophies (again, technically) and move on to something better.
thank god for that,at least they short!
"Joan or Carver"
Carver, no question. While both had "ends justify means" mentalities, Carver actually had more personality. We spend more time with him, see his crazy actions escalate over time. It's not a literal "cake or death? Oh and I'm murdering ALL OF THE PEOPLE, fyi" thing. As Jane mentions, I believe Carver was once a decent guy before the world went to hell.
Also? He's voiced by Michael Madsen. That man could give sinister, yet strangely warm and heartfelt, nuance to just bout anything.
"Kenny or David"
I wear my bias quite obviously, it's not even a fit comparison. In my mind, David couldn't hold a candle next to Kenny. They're not even in the same ballpark, league, or mf'ing sport. I'm legit surprised they're even compared next to each other.
Not sure if you're specifically replying to me, but
Did he?
Which is funny, considering that was likely done because they suddenly wanted a Carver-type of bad guy fuckin shit up aka wishywashy storytelling.
Btw, her plan wasn't explicitly to kill people, though. In fact, it's inferred that the plan was structured around NOT wiping out other settlements.
Eh.
Angry Dad Climax
You should have answered these in terms of who is more memorable to you.
I did?
It just felt uninspired, a lot of "more of the same." Doesn't help that it bears the cliched theme of "family is important." Can't tell you how sick I am of stories about family bonding. Clem not being the protagonist (like in season one, in case people forgot) was the least of the problems.
And really, it just sets the player up in this very awkward role of playing a neutral character who should have no knowledge or affection for Clem. I can't tell you how many times I had to pretend I just met Clem recently when picking Javi's dialogue options instead of this lovable character I've known for years. It's just awkward game design.
Finally, just take a look at The Final Season, episode 1, and you can tell just how mediocre TNF really was compared to the kind of effort the new team at Telltale put in. I recently read that Telltale had its creative director or something fired, and that the company had someone else put in charge with a better direction that wasn't focused only on commercializing other brands like Marvel and DC, which was what got me back into playing Telltale games again. And boy, Final Season really earned my trust with that with its vast amount of choices and interactions (and more importantly, consequences!), not to mention how meaty and lengthy the first episode was, even when compared to TNF's joke of a so-called "two-parter" episodes that were released back-to-back.
Bottom line, there's nothing inherently wrong with TNF; it just didn't impress or bothered to do anything more than churn out another decent story.
That being said, I did enjoy the later episodes, especially the last one (even the annoying "bait and switch" option was kinda clever). It's not often we get a happy ending in TWD universe, and I did kinda appreciate it. My Clem was renewed with hope again by the end (with a boy crushing on her), and boy, that alone was enough to make me smile.