A couple of my friends always thought of themselves as the kind of people who play videogames for the story, while I personally don't think I belong in that category despite how much I love RPGs, I have acknowledged since GTA IV, that Rockstar Games had, at least, top tier writing when it comes to dialogue in gaming. This was a new take back then, because most people that played videogames for the story would hype up the monoliths in the RPG genre as, in their eyes, the greatest videogame achievement in writing and storytelling.
Some would gently break the norm and say something like Silent Hill or Metal Gear Solid to be strong contenders to the pantheon of storytelling, but very few would acknowledge Rockstar Games' writers as even close to that level.
Jesus, look at how much things changed.
Not only have Rockstar did something to be deserving of status in that top tier of excellent stories in videogames, but it left me considering deeply that Red Dead Redemption 2 might have had the greatest story I've ever experienced in a videogame. But, to tell you the truth, after playing the epilogue, I was absolutely sure of it.
Apart from being an gutwrenching emotional punch to the gut, the story is filled with colorful, human characters that laugh, sing, and love each other, and not a single one of these ever turn into an edgy, or tropy walking cliché, which is something many beloved RPGs of old are guilty of doing.
But there are the good sort of clichés that makes the game extra charming, and it's every single cliché that codifies a moment that you can easily imagine when you think about westerns. There's mexican standoffs, there's train robberies, there's dynamite to open bank vaults, there's even a scene where two characters escape from a train in a rail cart, which would be something you would see in an old Looney Tunes episode.
There's absolutely no need to say anything else about this game's story, you're better off experiencing it on your own, and yet, we have to discuss and explain how well the story weaves into gameplay. Well, I don't think it does it perfectly.
For starters, this game requires a lot of patience. There's a lot of riding around on horseback, which thanks to RDR2's design, is mostly downtime. I would appreciate a harder difficulty mode that would allow me to play without a minimap, or map markers, and let me explore things on my own, so I could have a bit more agency. However, this would be a monumental task of game design that would require a lot of changes in RDR2's gameplay, so that the player wouldn't get lost looking for where to go next.
And still, no matter how excusable it is, the downtime is definitely real, and it makes the game feel so much longer. I think the developers acknowledge this problem, at least, because during the epilogue, a lot of traveling is skipped with cutscenes, so it doesn't extend the game even further to burn out even the most patient player.
However, if you somehow don't mind the downtime at all, there's a beautiful world and scenery in between. Unmistakenly, the world of RDR2 is a technical and artistical benchmark of breathtaking visual and audio design, both in soundtrack and ambience. There's a huge variety of environments spanning between cities, marshes, snow, deserts, forests and plains, all of them detailed to the brim with historically accurate items, buildings and even people.
When it comes to interacting with people, there are random events scattered across the open world which never get repetitive. And you can interact positively and negatively with almost anyone in this game. I've never actually seen "small talk" being part of a game's design, but it is here. The "small talk" you can engage in is charming and even funny at times, however you can use it to your advantage, by provoking people into assaulting you for example.
And if you choose to take it a step further in interacting with the open world, there are three major mechanics linked to it: robbing, hunting and fishing. There's locations with Legendary animals, which make up the open world boss encounters of this game. While I didn't spend much time fishing, hunting was something that I enjoyed and isn't a mindless task, as you need to track down good animals for fur quality (based on 1, 2 or 3 stars of quality), and give them a clean shot to not downgrade the fur quality. Furthermore, the ideal rifling, weapons and approach depends heavily on the animal you need. This strategic approach to hunting never feels overbearing to me, yet it never feels mindless either. Trying to find out where animals lived and hunting to feed the camps was something that I would engage with very often, to break the pace of just following around quests markers and having some agency of my own.
Let's also keep in mind that the game has nearly the whole map of RDR1, but if you only follow the story, it's never going to be explored. This means that Rockstar Games left it as an intentional carrot on a stick to engage you in further exploration. And of course, this new and obscured part of the map is also filled with random events, npcs, and new fauna and flora.
As far as the rest of the gameplay goes, it's... decent. The shooting does get tiresome after a while, and there's not much depth to it. Playing with a controller was really hard to get used to, but since I'm mostly a PC player for shooting games, that could be issue for me. Still, I had to turn on RDR2's auto-aim, since dying in RDR2 is very frustrating and breaks the game's whole pace, unlike games like Doom Eternal for instance where dying would get me pumped to try again. I acknowledge this is my fault, but it did detriment my enjoyment of the game. Not only that, the movement and riding controls are... really bad. Mashing X to ride really gets old and unnerving after a while. These problems are somewhat of a big hiccup in my enjoyment of the game, because they are... the majority of the game. It is mostly riding and shooting.
Another issue is that there's also a bit of skippable content, and if you like to collect trophies you better keep saves of each chapter in your hard drive. Ugh.
But despite these issues, I do believe Rockstar Games made a magical miracle here that took almost 10 years to develop. It's, in my eyes, the greatest story ever told in a videogame so far.
SIMILAR MEDIA:
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Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360/PS3): This game is a prequel to RDR for the X360 and PS3, and they both complete each other so well, that I expect a remake or remaster of RDR1 will be out soon just for people to experience the "whole" story. Don't worry, RDR2 can be still played as a self-contained story in it's own right. I feel that RDR1 is simply the continuation of RDR2's epilogue, and most of the "meat" of the story is still in RDR2.
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (PS4/Xbox One/PC/Nintendo Switch): I think the closest game to RDR2 is The Witcher 3. Both are very story driven, open-world games with colorful characters and storylines. And sadly, bth suffer from the same problem of downtime and the game just becoming following markers on the minimap. But eh, if you play videogames for their story, I don't think you would mind.
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The Wild Bunch (movie, 1969): I think this movie directly inspired this game. It's been a while since I've seen it, but it deals with four brotherly outlaws who were like family, trying to survive the end of the wild west era. There's even a dude named Dutch, here.
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Berserk (manga): This might seem like an odd choice, but I see a lot of Berserk in RDR2's story. Without saying too much, let's just say the Van Der Linde gang and the Band of the Hawk have a similar sort of... plot.
