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My big thing with the failure of this plot though is definitely the interns. I really don't like them at all because they are introduced as bullies and never get any repercussions for it. They just continually act ♥♥♥♥♥♥ towards Raz then show up at the end to "save the day" for some reason and I don't want them there because they suck. I kept thinking at some point the game was going to make them learn a lesson and say they were sorry for sucking but nope. The game seems to want you to like them too which I probably would have been more receptive if they hadn't been unredemptive ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Even them not passing at the end but putting Raz in charge of them or something would have maybe been enough.
It is also worth mentioning in relation, look how Raz acted towards Bobby Zilch, and how he acts in this. Granted, this is a larger group which could maybe be more intimidating, but he doesn't take Bobby's crap at all. And in this he is like a little wimp and falls for the oldest trick in the book with his clothes being stolen. It felt like an odd shift from a savvy kid to a bit of a pushover.
I do have to agree though that the writers seemed to get bored at about the second act when night starts falling. There was a lot of potential to explore certain concepts that they just... didn't really bother with at all.
(That said I will point out that the other grads DID actually help take out Maligula, even if Raz did all the heavy lifting. LaserExplosionDeluxe is right about their bullshittery just kind of been forgotten about though... I guess that's kids for you, I guess?)
I think the biggest reason why the interns were so forgettable is because you never really interact with them outside their hazing at the beginning or being side mission givers. The kids at camp didn't help you do anything with minds either, but you engaged with them a lot more often.
As for the cult and stuff, the people around the HQ will give hints about important characters during ambient dialogue such as not being able to find the mole when they're an agency full of psychics --> leading to the traitor having to be either someone who has a broken/missing/authoritatively unavailable brain. Oh, also, maybe we should spoiler that stuff but regardless, people are giving hints. Sasha will straight up say "necromancy isn't a thing" (not verbatim but still) and he's the smartest guy ever so that's obviously true.
For the video-gamey plot... I mean, this is a video-game. Also, the first game had the same issue but I think it was vastly improved in this one I believe. In fact, I'd say this game is too cinematic except the story is so good that I'm actually not upset about it and I absolutely loathe story-driven games.
The "bad endings" complaint doesn't make much sense here. This isn't that kind of game. Go play something from Dontnod if you want that.
I noticed this too, except also with Lilli. She acted very bizarre at the beginning of the game but luckily, she returned to her normal self later in the story. With Raz, he always acted more "adult": cussing, off-handedly remarking about drinking alcohol, and generally being a psychotic little prick (which he still is in this game); also the fact he's a psychic and couldn't tell what they were planning was odd. He acts like a complete baby in this, which is great because I think he's really adorable, but it is a bit odd and I did somewhat recently replay the previous game again (last year) so it's hard for me not to compare them. Sorry!
I don't want to compare the interns to the camp kids. It's a different story and yes, they do bully him but they are older and older people probably wouldn't be able to relate to this little kid so I get it and I think they were fine. You couldn't really interact much with the camp kids either other than telling Clem and Crystal to sing or watching them practice their specialty power while in this one they give you missions to do, tell you about the area, and drop information about other characters which is nice. Honestly, I think if you were to switch the interns with the camp kids, you'd be complaining about the same issue.
If you check the TV Tropes page for this game there's a bunch of cool 'foreshadowing' moments in the game, namely basically everything around FakeTruman, especially when he wakes up. It makes no sense that he would trust Raz over his own head of staff and DAUGHTER, and he tells Raz to "go fix Ford" literally just after Raz was just told 'we're trying to help people, not fix them'.
And yeah it was a bit disappointing that we didn't actually get to see any cult or necromancy, but hey, you have to hand it to the devs for throwing some juicy red herrings at us! [/s]
(Hellmuts mind part is literally hurts your eyes)
You are complaining that the plot of a video game is too videogamey?
They are as useful as the camp children were during the first game except they didn't even bother giving sidequests and rewards (except for Dogan but that was like once). Yeah, the teens didn't haze Raz like they did in the second game but aside some interactions to which you were mostly an outsider looking in, the camp kids were there basically as decoration in the first game. They didn't help you except in one or two cutscenes (and even then only two did, Lilly and the sailor-kid).
What bad endings? The previous game (and the VR game for that matter) didn't have bad endings. There was only one ending for each game in the series.
That was obvious misdirection. There is no cult except for one guy who makes sense to be member of such a cult.
However, Maligula's exchange with Nick was VERY weird. So I agree that there seems to be a rewriting in the script that the game contains bits and pieces of an earlier iteration where the cult was more prominent.
The interns helped, even if only in cutscenes. That actually puts them above a rank than the camp kids that did nothing but hide and outright refused to help Raz even though he asked each one (they supposedly helped increase your health but meh).
NotTruman finding himself there is odd, I give you that. How did he know how to get past the security of the grove? How did the interns? Unless the security was somehow turned off, they shouldn'T have been able to find themselves in that place.
It's so that they can animate his face to show emotions and the goggles prevent that. Same reason Isaac keeps pulling off his helmet to non-infected people in Dead Space 2, albeit with the extra caveat that he's doing that to show people that he's a real person rather than infected. But the out-of-game reason is the same: so the character's voice sounds natural rather than coming from a helmet.
I think the QA area ended up kinda underused. It's just a "go there and find the items" area, as well as a connection area to Green Needle Gulch that you never pass through again afterwards. I guess it works with how the Aquato family is standing apart from the Psychonauts, but you could have paid that motif off with something like having to go there to enter Nona's mind at the end.
One of the first levels is the Casino plot with Hollis' mind. Which Raz ends up blamed for despite the fact that we start the scene with a lesson where Hollis teaches mental connections, then leaves the kids alone while leaving some mental connection nodes hanging around. This is *such* an obvious setup, that I cannot believe that they let Hollis near kids. Sure Raz shouldn't have done it, but Raz is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ **ten years old**. I'm gonna say it, I'm pretty sure this makes Hollis a bad Psychonaut. Compare Sasha in the first game for a similar setup done better.
(In a related sentiment: "Let's force the ten year old to walk through a graveyard!" The *entire game* is the child endangerment area, and every adult is complicit if not willful. But of course, it's educational. The preteen has to learn about gambling, alcoholism, PTSD and drug use.)
The reason this is a problem is that the game sets off "Raz, you made a mistake here and now bad things will happen" a few more times throughout the story, and the precedent of Hollis clearly implies actually meaningful consequences there - but it never happens to nearly the same extent again. At most it's a boss battle or something. So that just doesn't work as a theme.
But my real issue is Gristol. Does anyone feel like the game really did him dirty? I don't know why they made him so relatable, if they were gonna turn around and completely dump on him in the plot. This starts with how there's an achievement for breaking all the speakers (I liked the song, but we're clearly *expected* to find it annoying), to how he's basically a traumatized child who has some wrong ideas about history due to growing up in extreme privilege, and the plot just continuously makes fun of him for being warped by bad experiences. Like how he's the only character who has a "propaganda minister" in his head, like none of the others tell themselves stories to make sense of their remembered experiences? But of course, he's from a generic eastern country, so propaganda ministers are just "par for the course." Of course he needs to be fought, but maybe 30% less condescension would have made his story a lot more honestly touching.
Seriously, can we talk about how the Psychonauts are basically the CIA? Even putting aside the unsanctioned military intervention in smaller countries, they literally torture - excuse me, experiment - that guy at the end as revenge. And we know that Otto engages in highly unethical things with brains, which *in story* resulted in traumatizing a character to the point where they were completely overwhelmed by any sensory input. Again, I want to repeat that - *in-story*, there is a character who has repeated panic attacks from sensory overstimulation due to actions by a heroic character that are never questioned or punished in any way.
(Sensory deprivation is widely acknowledged as a form of torture. They used it in Guantanamo Bay.)
And that's what they did by accident, to a person they liked! God knows what'll happen to Gristol Malik after the game.
I think the foundation of the plot is a very modern-liberal sentiment: there are healthy people, and there are people with psychological problems, and if you are wrong about something then you must be psychologically damaged. The plot comes close to something approaching subtlety with Gristol's perspective on the events in Grulovia, and we start entertaining the notion that good intentions may lead to bad outcomes, or that different groups may have different legitimate perspectives on the same events, but then we're supposed to take Ford's (tragic) version as basically objectively correct and Gristol's version as the infantile fantasy of a spoiled manchild. And there's nothing *wrong* about that, it's just sad to me that that's all they could think to do with that situation. We flirt with the idea that the heroes could be in the wrong - and then discard it. Because of course, the good guys couldn't really do bad things. That would be crazy.
To be clear, I still think the game is very good. It's just not quite as good as it could be.
Lol, this game is somewhat inspired by a true story. They purposely referenced a bunch of psychic stuff related to what the CIA did during the Cold War such as Project Stargate (using psychic spies during the Cold War),MK Ultra, & a psychic training camp (in real life, it probably took inspiration from the Remote Viewing Instructional Services) in Psy1. My mother's psychic and she taught me all of these things. That's what gets me about these two games, Mr. Schafer did a fantastic job at understanding psychic abilities and the science and history behind it and there are a lot of references to a lot of things in psychic culture I recognized.
Anyway, Gristol's biggest issue (in the story) is that he kidnapped the head of their org and stole their brain, not because of politics. He was not psychologically damaged in the game, Raz and Lili entered his mind to find out where he hid Truman; It's not like how Raz had to enter psychologically damaged people in the first game to fix them so they'd give him a macguffin. You might be confused by the plot because this is what happened:
Lucy returns to Grulovia, becomes Maligula, and frightens the Gzar. The Gzar wanted to kill her because she had become too dangerous to manage. Maligula flooded the nation and would've attempted to kill the royal, causing the Maliks to flee. The Psy6 arrived, "kidnapped" her, and returned her to the USA. Gristol was unaware of his father's plot to execute Maligula, believed they were fleeing the nation because the Psy6 kidnapped their most powerful family friend, and then decided it was a good idea to kidnap the head of the Psychonauts in a plot to revive Maligula and reclaim his throne for revenge.
He's correct in that his father was the cause of all of his problems (for the wrong reasons) but he went about his revenge against his family in the completely wrong way. You weren't supposed to take the propaganda level for fact because Gristol was too young to understand what was going on with his family and he had construed a false narrative with insufficient information.
About child endangerment: considering Raz's upbringing, I think the "child endangerment" in this is tame. He's not the typical upper-middle class child with the privilege of safety, he's dirt poor and would have his family fling knives and shoot him out of cannons for enough money to survive. He's not shy about the topic of alcoholism, he mentions drinking alcohol in the first game and he's aware enough to try to mentally connect gambling to being a bad thing. Also, he already learned about PTSD from the first game by trying to help Coach Oleander. Raz isn't the type of character who works being coddled, just because he's young, and both him and Lili are accurately portrayed simply as 10 year olds who like dark things and aren't afraid of more mature topics. Also, graveyards aren't an endangerment, nor are they scary, or bad. It's a place of mourning and peace.
The first game puts Raz at risk just as much, but in the first game the characters don't try to take the moral high ground and it's played for comedy. The lack of a thorough comedic framing in 2 is what invites these concerns to begin with.
Again, I'm not saying what the characters did to Gristol in the story was wrong. The *one thing* that is never questioned in the story is "The old Psychonauts were right to intervene in the internal politics of a foreign country by force to impose their morality." This is just assumed to be true in the framing of the story because "Maligula was a psychic and psychics are the Psychonauts' problem when they go bad, and also Maligula is a part of a person who shouldn't be 'out' and we have the authority to make that call", even though nothing that we saw of Maligula demonstrates to me that she's genuinely out of control aside her propensity for violence towards those who oppose her.
Was this morally wrong? I don't think so; I think it was morally *fraught* and I don't like the fact that it goes unquestioned.
(Especially since it seems like the game briefly flirts with the idea of questioning it before hurriedly backing away.)
> You weren't supposed to take the propaganda level for fact
Yeah I agree we weren't *supposed* to take it for fact, I'm saying we were supposed to take the countervailing narrative for fact because Gristol is continuously painted as *unusually* damaged and infantile. And I'm not saying this is *factually* wrong, I'm saying it makes for a poorer story.
The framing is "look at poor Ford and look at despicable Gristol."