In which the ending of LA Noire is discussed….

So. I just made it through LA Noire, and I’m really not sure what I think. Unsurprisingly for a game, I suppose, it is the ending that has left me a little muddled. I was with the game almost all the way through. Right up to the big twist.

Before proceeding, a quick warning that spoilers lie ahead. With that out of the way… You spend the whole game with Cole Phelps. You get to know the character, you get to like him. And then the rug is pulled out from under him/you, sending Phelps tumbling down the ranks in disgrace. For the next act, you’re left waiting for redemption. And it starts to look like you’re going to get it. The case is coming together, pulling in threads from earlier in the story.

But then the game shifts you to controlling a different character. For the final act, Phelps becomes a rarely seen side character. To begin with, this seemed like an interesting experiment. You’ll conduct this short investigation as this other character, he’ll uncover something, and then we’ll be back with Phelps. Err, you’ll be back with Phelps. Any time now. Gotta be coming up soon… Except it doesn’t. With about an hour or two to go, the game suddenly decides that this other guy’s story is more interesting.

When the game finally does hand control back to Phelps, it seems like a welcome relief. We’re heading into the big finish with the character that we actually care about. But then you play through one action sequence, a cut-scene plays, and then … oh, we’re back with this other guy. Which is especially odd as he and Phelps are in the same place, taking different routes to the same target.

And then to top things off, Phelps gets washed away in an unexplained wave of water, and dies. The hoped for redemption never really comes. You get a funeral scene where a character who previously screwed you over gives the eulogy, with several corrupt cops and politicians up there beside him. The game does make an interesting stab at a message of the futility of trying to eradicate evil from the city. By the end of the game you’re left to look back and see that most of the people you put in jail weren’t the ones who did it, and half the real bad guys got away with everything scott free. Gangster Mickey Cohen? The game forgets about him half way through. Corrupt police chief? Oh, he’s at your funeral. Scumbag former partner? Delivering your eulogy. Corrupt mayor? Yup, also still in office and at your funeral. And maybe I missed them, but the characters you actually liked? Rusty? The captain who runs homicide? Nowhere to be seen.

LA Noire has great literary ambitions for its story, but I feel like it forgets about its medium in the end. One of the great strengths of games as a narrative medium is the ability to make you identify with the character you control for x number of hours. You spend  a large chunk of time with them, getting inside them as a puppeteer. Few games have done a better job of this than LA Noire, in fact. The detail oriented gameplay — searching for clues, studying faces in conversations — forces you to think like Phelps in a way few other games ever have. So why go and throw away all of that at the very end?

This is actually the second time in a row that a Rockstar game has done this. Last year’s Red Dead Redemption had the character you’ve inhabited for the entire game go out in a bold last stand (which certainly was a great moment), and then drops you into the shoes of the character’s bratty son to finish out the story.

In both cases, these are interesting experiments. But I’m not sure how successful they are. Red Dead was probably the more successful of the two. Your character works for the whole game to try and build a better life for your son — but in spite of all you’ve done, that son sees you gunned down by the law. The game then drops you into control of the son, challenging you. Will you accept what has happened, and try to live the simple life your father tried to secure for you? Or will you let anger and revenge lead you down the path of an outlaw?

LA Noire … I’m not so sure. I can’t help thinking that the story would have actually been a better story if that redemption had come, and at the end of the game you’re just dumped back into Phelps’ shoes to keep exploring the wonderful reproduction of 1947 Los Angeles, responding to minor incidents as they come in over the radio, and maybe waiting for a sequel. Instead, LA Noire decides in the last 15 minutes that it is really a story about futility, disappointment, and hope’s dashed.

Compression

I still have the box for Grim Fandango, sitting carefully preserved on a shelf, complete with the original manual and little advertising flyers inside. I don’t think I could ever bring myself to throw it away. Preparing for a move to the far north of England in the coming weeks, I spent last night removing all of my other games and movies from their cases, placing the discs in a plain binder, and throwing away the plastic. A frighteningly tall pile of plastic. Perhaps I’m in shock, but I don’t think I actually care. I won’t miss them, certainly not like I would miss that Grim box. My only qualm was to double check that the packaging is, in fact, recyclable. (It is.)

Is this the decline of game packaging? Or is it merely that I’m older?

Despicable

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, aside from being quite possibly the worst named piece of entertainment of the decade so far, is a deeply challenging movie. I saw it about two weeks ago, and still find myself thinking about it all the time. Few films in the last few years have been so aggressively strange. The camera at one point watches a group of cops over the giant heads of two iguanas Nicholas Cage is hallucinating. At another, it runs off with an alligator through the reeds by a highway, for no easily discernible reason.

It also brings to mind an issue that has been bothering me for a while now. The character that Cage portrays in the movie is a horrible human being. Over the course of the movie he does things that are simply terrible. Which in a way, makes me not like the movie. I don’t want this person to exist. The movie puts him in front of me, and instinctively turns me against it. But it is still a fantastic movie. I don’t want to be quite so shallow as to hate a movie because it is about someone ugly.

There are similar problems in Rockstar’s latest game, Red Dead Redemption. As in the Grand Theft Auto games, there is a disconnect where the character as I have come to understand him should not be willing to work with the people he is taking orders from. He should not be willing to do some of the things that the game tells you to. And in a game, it almost feels worse as you are in some sense participating. Gameplay asks you to function like an actor, in a sense, performing the character. You are active in the story, even if you are just playing to a script. So you find yourself watching your character do things that seem below them, puzzled by why the game’s writers are making you do this. Sadly, the saving grace is that the expectations of the story in a Rockstar game is lower than those you might have for a Werner Herzog film. The Hausers have been putting together some pretty good stories, but their bleak outlook on human life still leaves them short of being able to tell a genuinely great story by the standard of other media.

On one hand, I’d like to be able to push myself to appreciate a narrative where the characters aren’t really likable. On the other, I think I’d rather keep my blinders on.