Burial at Sea: Part 2 goes Phantom Menace (spoiler Rant)

[Low Ping]

Burial at Sea part 2 kinda sucked.

The Story.

For some reason Jack, the protagonist from The orginial Bioshock has been elevated to the level of Messiah, like Darth Vader, and he is done so with out being characterized in any meaning full way. Why is it so importance Jack be the Hero. If the explotation of children is so egergious to her and had to be stopped why didn't she just use her tear powers to flood the entire city? The cost in lives would have been the Same as starting a civil war and crashing an airplane. Jack could have lived his entire life in peace never knowing about rapture or sea slugs.

It also answers questions you never asked. Did you ever have the pressing need to know how Atlas got Jack access phrase? Me niether. Was the slaying of Daisy May critical to the development of Elizabeth as a character as it related to the story. Not all she got out of that was a costume change. Elizabeth accept the fact that the Twins contrive a situation to maker her a killer, and she DOES NOT consider it a betrayal, instead she accepts it as nessary and allows it to inflate her own importance.

Also its very important to remember you are not Booker, but niether am I. Every DAmn conversation with booker ends with that reminder.


Gameplay

Stealth mechanic not as tight as it should be a lot of time you can aproach an from the side and still knock him out as long as his alert meter is not full. You don't get any reward for not killing anyone. I suppose they all die at the hands of Jack anyway. Then again no one really plays bioshock for the gameplay which always felt like it was getting in the way of the story.

This is not a continuation of Infinate or an expansion. Its a misguided love letter to bioshock one that's executed worse than bioshock 2

A woman completely submitting herself to an abusive man for the sake of a child is not a hero. Wait for another man to break the cycle of abuse for her, is not something to be praised

[Final Fangs]

Thank you. I felt the same way. They made it into a Bioshock story, rather than an Infinite story. I loved the first Bioshock, the ending was terrible, but even with a terrible ending, and it was still one of the most important games of the last generation. But it was complete. Bioshock 2 proved that. I didn’t have any questions left about Rapture. But I wanted to know Booker’s past. I wanted to know how Liz handled the stress of seeing all the doors. I didn't care about how the two cities were connected. I cared about Liz's life.

I DID NOT CARE FOR SALLY. Maybe the ending wouldn't have been so bad if they gave Sally a personality, but I don't care for the little sisters. They were supposed to be creepy and you were supposed to be afraid of them. If you're going to have Liz get beaten to death to save a little sister, at least make us care about her.

[Talon]

First off, this is a long post with a lot of points to it so please bear with me...I do have a quite a few bones to pick over...

Bottom line, I agree with you. Going along with a brutal evil demon tyrant thug willing to butcher and torture you and countless children isn't even close to heroic sacrifice especially since there were SO MANY ways out of the situation that would have saved the girl and Elizabeth's life without doing a damn thing for the demonking of freaks.

The "reward" for NOT killing anyone should be the downer ending we got...

However, the true ending is the one you should only EARN BY KILLING EVERYONE that so much as looks at Elizabeth funny. In this ending Elizabeth gets/regains her tear powers back and returns with Sally to Paris (where her journey into Rapture began again) eating croissants and learning how to speak French...courtesy of the little French girl holding the little red balloon named Sally.

Yeah, I said it. Why shouldn't she should kill all the demonic freakshows who get off on cutting little girls up and slicing their lives, hearts, livers, splines, and everything in between (not to mention the souls) out of these little girls just for their next Adam fix.

Yeah, that's right!

You should be PENALIZED for leaving any of THESE hellspawn alive! Any act of "mercy" shown to any of these demonkin should constitute an EVIL ACT in this game. Totally...100%...Grade A...Unadulterated...Evil...

Why is Booker trying to guilttrip Elizabeth? These creatures are abominations. They deserve NO MERCY! Leaving any of them alive just means they get to take more little sisters down with them and those little sisters remember from Bioshock 1 and 2 are going to get sliced and diced and eaten...these demonspawn are going to suck the Adam from their bones...

Perhaps, I'm being unclear so let me put my final solution to the Rapture Slicer problem in the simplest possible terms...

KILL THEM ALL!

KILL THEM NOW!

MAIM! KILL! BURN!

MAIM! KILL! BURN!

FOR THE GLORY OF CHAOS!

*Cough* *Cough* *Cough*

Ahm...Sorry, about that...was I going a bit over the top?

*Deep breath*
*Slow exhale*

Ok, moving on...

Killing them all (the Good/Light side path) means the Hells are a little fuller and Jack has fewer freakshow heads to crack on his goodwill Victory tour through Atlas/Fountaine's entrails...

Think of it another way, let's assume Atlas' life is sacrosanct for some mysterious reason (given the number of realities this is absurdly convienant). He could still find out the command phrase ANY OTHER WAY and I wouldn't care a bit.

Atlas can happily lure Jack down to grind his own ass into so much sausage filler to his heart's content and/or prepare himself for a little sister stabby mcstabfest with himself featured prominently as the brightly colored toy at the bottom of the happy meal box (good end) of Bioshock 1.

Go ahead and have your continuity into the story of BIOSHOCK 1 but please find some way of doing it without derailing Elizabeth's character into a pawn of the demonking. She should have tried something to checkmate him before she lost her omniscience.

Contriving to force Elizabeth into the suicidal martyr this way was lazy and stupid and pointless character derailment . Elizabeth wasn't built up as being lazy, suicidal, or stupid - quite the opposite so why was she forced into the Booker role was so dumb I want to bunch the idiot that handed her that sort of ridiculous script. Booker does not equal Elizabeth and its lazy and dumb to equate the two lifestories as being equivalent.

I can buy Booker wanting to cash out and needing redemption from a violent death by drowning but I can't buy Elizabeth throwing herself away to save one little sister she could have saved any number of ways.

How could they have improved on this downer ending? Oh, let me count the ways:

1. If you have to sacrifice your demigoddess powers then at least use that omniscience while you have it to manuever your pieces into play before your chessmatch wiith Fate itself (and the worthless demonspawn) by among many other things:

Sending yourself a few clear concise messages from your omniscient self via the wild twins like Sally is located at such and such location and here is how you get to her (sneak in and reclaim her). Atlas will be vulnerable here, here, and here and here is where you can get the wrench he intends to use on you at the end of this pony ride. Hit him with it and hit him again and again until he stops moving then stab him with little sister stabby things. You can kill most of his thug chattel if you seal off this entrance and flood this chamber here at such and such a time (Sally rescued earlier - this is for vengeance and salvation).

2. You can use the big daddy to save yourself and Sally at such and such moment (the murder scene) after it imprints on a little sister by showing the little sister Sally being mistreated by Irish thugman 3K421. This has the added incentive of being poetic justice for obvious reasons.

3. She is an omniscient demigoddess of Fate who can physically travel anywhere and anywhen at the end of Infinite. She has no causality but can create ripples in Fate itself.

All she has to do is open a tear/create a future where humanity has Ascended into Angelic/Ascended lifeforms and turn that power loose on all the threads of Creation in a holy crusade to rip the Atlas' of the dimensional planes new ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

If she wasn't already there at the end of infinite, then she could have taken whatever steps were necessary to Ascend herself into the role of Protector of All Good People Everywhere and used an Angelic Order of dimensional Sliders/followers of her own to achieve a lasting force for Good that transcended her existence and spanned all dimensions within her reach.

Is there some compelling reason she can't restore humanity's hopes and dreams?

She already has the power to create her own Order of Angels and embark upon a multiversal Crusade founded on the guiding principle that "Most vices miss what is right by being excessive in feeling or in action, while virtue finds and chooses the mean" and finding that golden mean for herself by among other things killing the damned and sparing the innocent, having empathy and compassion for those who haven't cast theirs aside, etc. and so forth...

Recap:
1. Ascend herself into an omniscient Angel demigoddess. This assumes she wasn't one already at the end of Infinite.
2. Create an Angelic Order of Dimensional Sliders - her own followers - drawn from the finest Mundane/Ascended humans she can find and can convince to join her. None of them will be able to trick an omniscient Elizabeth so showing them how to Ascend to be somewhat on a level with her is a safe and effective means of gaining loyal followers armed with the same/similar array of powers she has at her command. She will need these followers if she is to...
3. Launch a truly Holy War across the multiversal planes. Open a dimensional tear to everyworld within reach to rid humanity of its demon infested realms and individuals. Create her own variables and her own constants through her own actions and the actions of those who follow her Crusade.
4. Purge all Evilspawn from one world after another until all the cruelties of Fate lie dead and buried beneath her and her cadre of fellow dimension sliding supernatural Angel spirits.
5. Grow ever stronger with every world cleansed of its truly evil men and women to create a different sort of empire - a multidimensional one that doesn't crave/worship power as an end unto itself but finds and chooses the Golden Mean of human Virtue.

Rinse and Repeat until all those demonspawned freakshows of all the infinite planes lie dead and mangled into little puddles of gooey sludge or Fate creates something more demonic which can stop you and yours that actually does.

True, she may still die alongside her followers but what a life! What a singularly wonderful legacy to leave behind her! Far more than simply saving good people's lives she will have saved their hopes and dreams and hearts and souls as well. Ryan would certainly have choked to death and froth in dissonant rage before this living Angelic manifestation of everything he (like Ayn Rand) hates: stuff like humanity, kindness, charity, mercy, forebearence, fairness, a sense of justice, community, a higher order, and love. All of this would be anathema to him and his Ayn Randian way of thinking...

4. Lay a cache of weapons/set up an ambush to counter ambush Atlas at all the points everywhere you foresee he murders/choloroforms/captures/tortures you. Then kill/drive him off/grab Sally and escape via the wild twin's interdimensional rowboat back to Paris for some more croissantes and a few hundred French language lessons from your new adoptive daughter Sally.

I could go on and on and on but you get the point.

Having omniscience prior to losing her memories makes her sacrifice all the more meaningless at the end since she knew damn well it was pointless. Her ability to open tears and manipulate space and time and consequence made her life in big picture turns utterly priceless. She should have valued her own life at least as much as one little sister who was doomed to wait for Jack to come and save her from Rapture.

For any character to be a hero they should have created a way to save herself and the girl both kill as many of Ryan's and Atlas' thugs and then escape with help from daddy Booker whose Adam she must have absorbed (like Delta lived on in Eleanor - don't say Elizabeth the demigoddess of Fate and dimensional sliding among a host of other powers wasn't equal to having Booker preserved the same way).

Assuming Fate wasn't going to provide her a better script than this then she needed to be HEROIC and create a loophole for herself and the one little sister she is dooming herself for...what? For Jack to come in and save the little sisters after Atlas learns some cheesy command phrase for him? That's lame!

When I think of the unlimited power for good she might have fashioned for herself and all the wasted potential for her to become a force for good in the cosmos...I feel sick.

[Burninator]

Agreed wholeheartedly!

[Alcator]

Civilians in the city chose to be there. The children did not. They were born there, or kidnapped there.

To think that flooding the whole city (and killing all the little sisters with the rest of the population) is the same as allowing a civil war to happen and saving the little sisters is ridiculous.

Elizabeth is not omnipotent. She is omniscient, but only within the constraints imposed by the Constants. Simply put, once Ryan built Rapture and got people inside and started kidnapping Little Sisters, some futures are no longer possible.

[xTopxHatxTerr0rx]

I'm going to be the odd man out here but loved this dlc. I love how it tied everything together in a dark screwed up way. I think the Bioshock series has some of the best writing in any video game franchise I have ever seen.

[Blewris]

Originally posted by Final Fangs:

I DID NOT CARE FOR SALLY. Maybe the ending wouldn't have been so bad if they gave Sally a personality, but I don't care for the little sisters. They were supposed to be creepy and you were supposed to be afraid of them. If you're going to have Liz get beaten to death to save a little sister, at least make us care about her.

Did you play the first game? They were creepy until you started to save them and make them normal again. It's not their fault that they are monsters. You should care about them as the children they truly are not the little sisters they were turned into.

[słıﺎﺎ ωαłɛr]

Originally posted by Blurwald:

Originally posted by Final Fangs:

I DID NOT CARE FOR SALLY. Maybe the ending wouldn't have been so bad if they gave Sally a personality, but I don't care for the little sisters. They were supposed to be creepy and you were supposed to be afraid of them. If you're going to have Liz get beaten to death to save a little sister, at least make us care about her.

Did you play the first game? They were creepy until you started to save them and make them normal again. It's not their fault that they are monsters. You should care about them as the children they truly are not the little sisters they were turned into.

The main problem is there is lack of character development when it comes to the Little Sisters and that's why it is very difficult to develop any kind of empathy towards them.

[Sardonic]

No no no, you see it's like poetry, they rhyme. Booker dies sacrificing himself, so elizabeth dies sacrificing herself because reasons.

[Alcator]

Originally posted by ىłıﺎﺎ ωﻪłɛr:

The main problem is there is lack of character development when it comes to the Little Sisters and that's why it is very difficult to develop any kind of empathy towards them.

Or perhaps the main problem is gamers who have read a couple of articles about "How important a character development is", and now demand to see it everywhere, even in games which cover a timespan of couple hours...

Honestly, when you fall in love with a woman, is it because you see "Character development" in her? :-)

"Lack of Character development" is a lame excuse professional critics use when they want to explain why an otherwise good movie gets a low score. It is not something that could possibly apply to Little Sisters.

[heikoschuster1985]

@Low Ping and Talon:

Very good posts that put it in a nutshell. Like Burninator I agree with it wholeheartedly. I really don't like the way Liz is portrayed, she acts stupid and despite of her powers she is helpless at Atlas' mercy.
A senseless sacrifice and what Atlas has done to her makes me sick. I've got a notation that Levine enjoyed making these scenes, in which Liz got punched and tortured.

Also I wonder why every playable character - except Jack in the very first Bioshock - has to die... by now it's no surprise, if the playercharacter dies at the end of a Bioshock-Game. And if I'm not surprised by the end it's a lame end.

Finally I've to agree with Low Ping again. A woman who totally submits herself to an insane man is a very sordid massage and morale.

[japporo]

Just an incredibly dumb ending. It would have been ridiculously easy for pre-nerf Liz to stick her head out a tear and yell "Hey, Atlas, here's the code!" and still arrange to get Sally away from them.

(I mean, really, Atlas is willing to accept her decrypted version of the key phrase *after* whacking her with the wrench the first time, so he's not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer)

A silly, meaningless sacrifice. I am disappointed.

[heikoschuster1985]

Originally posted by japporo:

(I mean, really, Atlas is willing to accept her decrypted version of the key phrase *after* whacking her with the wrench the first time, so he's not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer)

Hehe, right.
In that scene he reminds me of Homer J. Simpson. XD

[Ivlichnov]

Originally posted by Talon:

First off, this is a long post with a lot of points to it so please bear with me...I do have a quite a few bones to pick over...

Thanks Talon for making me laugh out loud, when reading this and thinking about the way BaS Ep 2 ended.

I didn't expect to do that.

I don't blame the Little Sisters, they were victims of circumstance as much as Elizabeth was. But then Elizabeth chose to pursue Comstock after he fled to Rapture. Here she was making more of her own decisions, but she did say that she was working in debt collection for her clients. Did she mean wronged Elizabeth's or the Lutece's?

Elizabeth never had a hope while caught between Comstock, Booker and the Lutece's. No positive influence's. Only with Booker in the second half of Infinite.

[Oberon]

Originally posted by Low Ping:

If the explotation of children is so egergious to her and had to be stopped why didn't she just use her tear powers to flood the entire city?

Are you high?

I mean, really. Save the children by drowning them. You must be high.

Originally posted by Low Ping:

Was the slaying of Daisy May critical to the development of Elizabeth as a character as it related to the story.

Who is Daisy May?

[Talon]

Originally posted by heikoschuster1985:

@Low Ping and Talon:

Very good posts that put it in a nutshell. Like Burninator I agree with it wholeheartedly. I really don't like the way Liz is portrayed, she acts stupid and despite of her powers she is helpless at Atlas' mercy.
A senseless sacrifice and what Atlas has done to her makes me sick. I've got a notation that Levine enjoyed making these scenes, in which Liz got punched and tortured.

Also I wonder why every playable character - except Jack in the very first Bioshock - has to die... by now it's no surprise, if the playercharacter dies at the end of a Bioshock-Game. And if I'm not surprised by the end it's a lame end.

Finally I've to agree with Low Ping again. A woman who totally submits herself to an insane man is a very sordid massage and morale.

I know right? He enjoys seeing his "daughter" getting all tortured and brutally murdered in gorn fashion by a bunch of antagonists but show her *gasp* having consensual sex with some dude as an adult and he gets all squimish and outraged like "that isn't right! Hands off, Internets! That's my daughter!".

Honestly I never knew about any of it before he made such a big deal out of it. Now having seen the ending I can't help but wonder at his objections. If he didn't want people to do it then why advertise it so strongly? If you are sincere, then wouldn't it have made more sense for you to keep your mouth shut rather than draw so much attention to it by screaming its presence and your opinion of it to all and sundry?

Rule 34 of the Internet, Mr. Levine: "If it exists, then there is porn of it. No execeptions."

Go look it up on the tvtropes site if you are confused, Mr. Levine. That site is awesome.

Forgive me if I'm wrong but is your "moral outrage" linked to whether you get to collect money for it? Unless you can make the case that its ok to create gorn featuring "my (adult) daughter" so she is tortured and dies just so one day a prince named Jack will come and save the day. Why would tell the INTERNET that showing Elizabeth HAVING CONSENSUAL SEX with some mystery dude is wrong because... SEX is EVIL?

Heh..if that's so then Evil is Sexy...

Its counterproductive to tell the internet what not to do...you only encourage it by drawing so much attention to it.

After all, Elizabeth is portrayed in game as a fully grown adult woman so telling the INTERNET not to do something that most fully grown adult women in the real world choose to do quite frequently while at the same time featuring her brutal torture and murder at the hands of a rabid murdering psychopath frothing at the mouth at the end of episode 2 seems by itself a brutal dissonance in moral sensibilities.

You killed your "daughter", Mr. Levine. You did so in a particularly brutal and hamhanded fashion by rendering this intelligent, resourceful demigoddess of Fate utterly helpless before a homicidal lunatic who will go on like the rest of the Rapture's surviving adult population to cut up little girls and suck the marrow from their bones for the power of Adam.

How is that not character derailment? She wouldn't help this irish scumlord but she would and should either try to kill him and/or hamper his plans...a better story could have been made by having Elizabeth play a Xanathos Gambit against the irish demonlord and not just about getting Sally back from him. As the villian, Atlas could have countered with guileful moves of his own causing a move-countermove sort of chessmatch dynamic between him and Elizabeth...but I digress.

Another problem is the idea that Booker tells you that you should avoid killing Rapture's adult slicer population for seemingly no reason other than just because "KILLING IS WRONG" is even nuttier...

At best, the adults are empty Adam addicted vessels who are already dead inside - the only question is how many little girls they will Slice before Jack kills them. At worst, they are mutant abominations completely beyond any hope of redemption or salvation.

In either case, I say kill them all, Elizabeth.

For Booker or Booker's Adam or whatever that Booker was in her head to tell Elizabeth to not make Rapture worse by advocating she NOT kill reavers and slicers and child-murdering psychos is REALLY DUMB...at best those things masquerading as people are already dead. The only question is how many innocents are they going to kill in the time between Elizabeth's stupid sacrifice and Jack's arrival. In Bioshock 1, Jack proceeds to purge the very same adult population Booker warns Elizabeth AGAINST killing at the start of the episode.

That is sick and twisted logic, dude. Killing child murdering Adam addicted lunatics only makes Rapture a better place (fewer little sisters die) not worse. At this point in Rapture that means killing off Rapture's entire surviving adult population. The good doctor Tenebraum fled Rapture leaving the little sisters behind her to get sliced and eaten. Everyone else we meet in Rapture is sorely in need of ventilating.

A better moral for this story is to kill all those who have lost their empathy and humanity in defense of those who might be saved.

@OP: Oh, I would suggest it is better to flood PARTS of the city, not to flood the whole city or any part of it populated with innocent/savable little sisters but the subsections/chambers filled solely with Rapture slicer scum. You will note that the city is broken into subsections seperated by airlocks. Trapping a bunch of Slicers and brutal murdering thugs behind her inside one of these sections and drowning them seems very appropriate.

You will also note that there aren't many little sisters running around Episode 2 (one reason why Atlas wants back into Rapture proper was to add more to his collection) - I only remember off the top of my head the two at the end (that Elizabeth helps imprint on the Big Daddy that she should have lured into the thugs holding Sally) and Sally. I do remember a few Big Daddies around too but those guys could easily survive the open ocean floor with those massive underwater suits they come standard within...so its no loss at all.