<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nI’ll repeat my earlier warning: Spoilers ahead. I mean, this game is really, really obvious and I sort of balk at the notion that any of this could spoil the game for you. Don’t get me wrong, Stuff Happens in this game, and People Die, but it’s all played for lulz and I don’t think the plot is the driving force here. But fair warning: Stuff will be spoiled. <\/p>\n
In fact, we’re going to start with the biggest spoiler of all, which happens in the first 15 minutes of the game…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jonny Gat Dies!<\/h3>\n
 <\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nSo Jonny Gat… dies<\/em> in the tutorial? <\/p>\n Throughout the game, I never believed he was dead. He’s easily the most recognizable and iconic character in the series, and his personality was a perfect snapshot of the game’s gleefully manic and single-minded approach to fun and murder. Jonny Gat was the personification of Saints Row itself and served as the visual representative of the game because the main character has no set race or gender. <\/p>\n I couldn’t imagine that Volition would kill him off, and so I wasn’t buying his off-screen death without a funeral, a body, or a proper goodbye. When the game began wrapping up and he was still dead, I was genuinely surprised. <\/p>\n Why did they kill him off? It’s not like they needed to manufacture a motive for the main characters to take over a city and kill their enemies. The cast certainly didn’t need much of an incentive in Saints Row 2. Besides, you kind of avenge his death at the end of the first act, which makes his death a very expensive means of driving a small part of the story that didn’t need any help in the first place.<\/p>\n She was a hippie, a burnout, and a slacker. The kind of bohemian woman who would decorate her apartment with lava lamps, beanbags and beaded curtains, and would always have some nameless friend-of-a-friend sleeping on her couch. While everyone<\/em> in the Third Street Saints is a homicidal maniac, she was always the mellow one in relative terms. Usually the voice of reason, Shaundi had a low, relaxed delivery. <\/p>\n Despite being burned out by drugs, she still managed to come off as the smartest member of the team. (Not that the competition was particularly fierce.) <\/p>\n In the sequel, this is Shaundi:<\/p>\n A Maxim-looking babe who has no discernible personality beyond “angry”. You might argue that this personality shift was the result of what happened to Johnny Gat in the tutorial, but note that she was angry and complaining throughout the mission, long before anything happened to Johnny. It’s not that events changed her, it’s that Volition replaced her with a completely different and much less interesting character. They even replaced her voice actress. I don’t know why they didn’t just put her on a bus<\/a> and bring in a new character that suited their purposes better. <\/p>\n New Shaundi comes off as crazy and angry all the time, but unlike with Jonny Gat she doesn’t get to be witty or clever. At best she’s used as a target for cheap laughs as the other characters agitate her into another fit of impotent fury. She doesn’t make jokes, she’s the butt of them. <\/p>\n In the middle of the game there’s a series of quests where Shaundi has to keep Josh prisoner. Josh is an annoying actor who has a crush on her and won’t stop hitting on her. All of the comedy here comes from Shaundi getting pissed off and growling without ever doing anything. She’s completely toothless. <\/p>\n Note that if someone was stupid enough to deliberately agitate Johnny Gat, he would have found an amusing way to shut them up. You’d come home to find Johnny hanging the guy out the window by his ankles, or that he and Pierce were taking turns tasering him for sport. Instead, Shaundi whines and makes empty threats. Ha ha! Look at how stupid and powerless she is in the face of an unarmed actor.<\/em><\/p>\n Despite all her bark, she does very little biting and doesn’t seem to get much in the way of revenge. In fact, this new “badass” Shaundi manages to get captured by the bad guys. Twice<\/em>. So her new character focus is violence and aggression, but she’s apparently weaker then old “stoner” Shaundi. She’s our replacement crazy person for absent Gat, except she’s irritating, inept, and humorless.<\/p>\n She was arguably the most interesting character in the game, and she’s been replaced with a one-note dunce who basically looks like any of the generic bimbos that inhabit Steelport. <\/p>\n What a stupid waste.<\/p>\n Man, I don’t know what to say about Pierce. I mean, the opening crawl sort of covers it…<\/p>\n Actually, his status as the “whiny one” goes to show just how badly they messed up with Shaundi. When Pierce is whiny it comes off as funny because it’s usually a set-up for a joke. Shaundi’s whining is<\/em> the joke.<\/p>\n What a stupid waste.<\/p>\n Nerd-bait Kinzie Kensington was probably the standout success among the new allies introduced in the game. While the Kinzie missions were rudderless like almost everything else in the second act, hers were slightly more focused than the others. Also, the “computer hacker” archetype is a handy one for the purposes of mission design and exposition, so she was a much-needed addition to the lineup. <\/p>\n Q: Hey, how does Kinzie suddenly have such strangely detailed information on the bad guys required for this mission?<\/p>\n A: She computer-hacked it! Angel was less interesting. I'm glad to see Hulk Hogan working, but they didn't really do much with his character in this game. He didn't have an angle on the Syndicate. He didn't have money, weapons, power, or intelligence. All he had was fortune-cookie wrestleman platitudes. He starts off spouting wisdom about facing your foes, or your fears, or whatever it was that he was on about. <\/p>\n Later you help him recover his luchador mask from the casino vault. (Which is inexplicably hanging open. And hang on, I'm a gangster, right? Why am I in a vault and not filling my pockets with cash?) Suddenly Angel starts talking about how he never had the confidence to regain his mask until he met the Saints. Or something? So I guess he had a whole character arc take place off-screen while we were doing jobs for Kinzie and Zimos?<\/p>\n Again, I don't want to give the impression that I'm expecting Planescape Torment<\/em> level writing from this thing. I understand the story is mostly an excuse to blow stuff up. But the whole, \"Meeting the Saints has somehow provided an unseen solution to an unseen problem\" struck me as being an odd thing to put in there.<\/p>\n Zimos was the weakest of the new lineup. He was funny at first, but \"guy who says everything auto-tuned\" is more funny on paper than it is in practice. After a while I got sick of his musical dialog and his sleazy pimp act. I suppose it doesn't help that most of his missions suffered from a bad case of, \"This is kind of fun but I have no idea why we're doing it.\" <\/p>\n Unlike all of the other characters, Zimos vanishes from the story once you're done with his missions. You can still call him up and have him accompany you on open-world activities, but he doesn't have any further involvement with the plot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ll repeat my earlier warning: Spoilers ahead. I mean, this game is really, really obvious and I sort of balk at the notion that any of this could spoil the game for you. Don’t get me wrong, Stuff Happens in this game, and People Die, but it’s all played for lulz and I don’t think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[164],"class_list":["post-16142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-saints-row"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |
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