So I finished the game two nights ago and figured I'd write down my thoughts before they fade away but also it's been long enough where I can reflect on things a bit.
So firstly my ending(s):
Simon, North, Josh and Markus are all alive, I did the full peaceful route (more on that later) and I ended up romancing North (more on that later) and the US Army stood down after they saw us kissing (lol). Connor was a bro to Hank and he ended up becoming deviant and freeing the androids from the cyberlife facility and Hank shot the fake Connor. Kara gave up after Alice died right when they hit the Canadian border because she got shot and the boat started sinking. I used Luther as a distraction to get away from the bus guards and I guess he died because they never mentioned him again. Thwarted Cyberlife's assassination attempt on Markus as Connor.
I legitimately could not finish Heavy Rain so this was an improvement as the controls and voice acting were greatly improved and the dialog was mostly better. The soundtrack was good too.
Now on to the issues. And there are a lot of them. I'm sure many of them have been discussed at length but yeah. First I'm gonna cross-post from another LTTP thread on it:
"It's probably the most heavy handed videogame narrative out there at best. It also doesn't do anything interesting with the setting, this quote really sums it up well
What's the message of Detroit that it keeps beating us over the head with? "Slavery is bad. Racism is bad." Over, and over, and over, everything in the world is designed to send this message before it's designed to work on its own.
Woolie brings up in today's Detroit episode that slavery is still being practiced today (though he mixed up the names and thought it was Liberia instead of Libya). Hey, that's a relevant point! Does the slavery in Detroit resemble the modern slavery in Libya at all? No, not really, it has nothing to say about that.
And a lot of people are concerned about a resurgence of racist ideologies in the Western First World, A valid concern! Does the racism in Detroit resemble these resurgent reactionary movements? No, not really, it has nothing to say about that.
Detroit stacks the deck so far in the androids's favor it's worthless. Our androids are sympathetic, photogenic, totally human from the word "go". The game hammers home to us that anti-android bigots are stupid and repulsive, enough so that they spend thousands of dollars to buy androids and are then OVERWHELMED by their own violent awfulness and have to inflict terror and harm on their own, expensive, androids. Prejudice isn't seductive and the wrongdoers don't think they are doing right. It's just an endless parade of Bad Racism Is Bad.
(the OP and the rest of the quote start to trail off into KIA-land tho so I just selected the good parts)
or this
The message is "we should accept them, because they're just like us."
Except that's entirely besides the point. Non-human personhood is an interesting idea, but the meat of the discourse is when the sentient entity isn't like us. When you're only talking about androids that absorb Messiah-like abuse on a daily basis and make paintings and pet kittens, you're priming an audience to only accept their human-like qualities. That's not diversity, you're accepting them in spite of their differences, not because of them.
It's worse than being short-sighted, the lesson of offering empathy only when the non-human does a human thing (or in the race analogy, only liking a black person when they do a white person thing) is inherently divisive and tribalistic. If this game had any soul, it would be in approaching the challenge of a threatening, faceless machine, and learning how to empathize with it. Instead, we get emotional manipulation in service of a Barbie doll.
It's better than Heavy Rain because it at least has competent English voice acting but man it is still a far cry from being a good story. Then there's the QD and David Cage fuckery going on on top of it all."
So yeah, beyond not doing anything unique with the androids and basically just making them "humans with mechanical aspects", completely botching how prejudice is handled in real life, missing the mark entirely on subtelty and using Detroit itself while not utilizing or referencing its history in regards to racial tensions and making it not even look or feel like the actual city (which would be enough to completely trash the game)... it has other, more specific narrative problems as well.
- The fact that most androids don't "wake up" on their own and instead require conversion is a complete miss on why machines gaining self-awareness is interesting, they're just acted on by an external object
- Similarly how Connor's descent into deviancy was ended with a binary choice of literally "become a deviant or stay a machine". Why did we even need that? He already showed signs of deviancy in my playthrough, having it be a simple choice like that was such a misfire
- The Kamski mission presenting Chloe and making it some big test of empathy when that specific Chloe was the earliest Android model to pass the Turing test so she may as well be a block of wood and she doesn't say a word let alone move or beg for her life or anything made the only reason that I didn't shoot her was because I didn't wanna anger Hank. Take this scene from The Good Place as a better example of how it should have worked
- I liked the gimmick of the characters intertwining and I wish it happened more, the fact that it was only for the last two chapters (albeit they were long ones) and a single one where Connor investigates Kara was a bit of a disappointment.
- The characters constantly saying how much your choices matter and how you will decide the fate of things etc. was really on the nose and clumsy
- The elementary school take on revolutions and civil rights especially in America. The fact that Josh is so binary "always dialog 100% violence is never the answer" and North's "let's kill all the humans they suck and don't understand us greater good yeah!" was eye-roll worthy
- The poaching of famous civil rights phrases or imagery, "we have a dream", the freedom march in general. Just awful fucking stuff that makes Deus Ex Mankind Divided's take on augmented humans look like Citizen Kane.
- The QTEs were generally ok but I hated how the ones that utilized the motion controls needed to have a direct line of sight with the PS4, made playing while lying in bed impossible
- Them trotting out the Alice being an android spoiler for like 3 chapters before it was actually revealed (Sorry Luther I know you're saying what you want to tell me about the only person I care about in this world is super important but you should just say your one line of dialog later for dramatic suspense)
- Minor complaint but whenever they wanted to convey crowd noises and stuff the sound mixing was way off and you could easily discern that it was just a few VAs talking into a mic
- the dialog prompts being waaaaay too vague leading me to constantly say things I didn't mean to and made choosing things harder than it should have been, combined with a very infrequent autosave/checkpoint system
- At the end Amanda was saying how actually this was all according to plan (evil mustache twirl) and Connor executing Markus was just what they wanted. Except.... how would rampant deviancy, losing control of their production facilities etc. be good for a corporation focused on making a profit just from selling a product?
- Why didn't all of Jericho especially the leaders rip off their LEDs? I feel like that's a pretty easy way to be spotted and killed
- For a game about androids in the 2030s only being able to romance (and with a super half-hearted romance plotline) a woman (and a literal sexbot at that) was blegh
I'm sure there are other problems too but those are the ones that come to mind immediately. Overall I still enjoyed it enough and the branching is pretty good but it is SUPER flawed.
