"Ohana means family. Family means everyone dies, or is forgotten."
Reviewer’s Note: After this note, this review will contain
heavy spoilers for Episode 5 of The Walking Dead: Season 2 and general spoilers
for The Walking Dead: Season 2. This review will cover general thoughts on the
season as a whole, but have the most in depth thoughts on Episode 5.
As you can see, the above are all of my choices for the
first four episodes of the season. I’ll show my choices for Episode 5 at the
end, though I’m sure that by the end of the review, you’ll more or less know
what I chose in Episode 5.
In a way, I have a bit of an interesting history with
Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I originally tried out the first season after
Giant Bomb’s love of it on their Game of the Year podcasts, but I really wasn’t
a big fan of the first episode. I came back to it around June of this year,
starting from Episode 2 on, and just about marathoned the rest of that season,
slowly growing to like it more and more, and absolutely loving Season One’s
finale.
Luckily, by that point, there were already three episodes of
Season Two available to play, so I was able to dig right in.
Season Two, as many of you know, stars Clementine, the young
girl Lee charges himself with protecting in the first season, who has now
become an intrepid survivor in the post-apocalypse. Throughout the entire
season, you end up going throughout multiple groups of people, sadly losing
plenty of people who become friends along the way. Though, this is to be
expected, as loss of loved ones is one of the biggest parts of The Walking Dead
series.
The gameplay has changed just a bit from Season One, mostly
in that a lot of the slow, obtuse puzzles have been removed for more quick
paced QTE’s and movements while performing actions normally done with just
clicking. While this change streamlines the game for the better in a lot of ways,
it also takes out a lot of the adventure out of the adventure game, which is a
bit saddening, as Telltale has touted The Walking Dead as an adventure game,
and a lot of the classic adventure game stylings are gone, focusing more on the
story, dialogue, and writing.
This is not to say that focusing on the story, dialogue, and
writing, is a bad thing. However, it seems to be that the writing has been a
bit lackluster in comparison to the final episodes of Season One. The first three episodes are pretty solid
writing, and although some things feel a bit forced (such as Kenny’s miraculous
survival), they’re very strong overall.
I feel like, however, the season started to reach a bit of a
downhill spiral starting from Episode Four on. It feels like at that point, the
most important part of The Walking Dead games, the writing, quickly started to
waver, as many characters seemed to go in rather odd directions with their
arcs.
The treatment of Sarah was also something that really harmed
my opinion of the game after finding out about things said by game creators. I
originally thought of the character Sarah, a young girl near Clementine’s age
you meet in Episode One, who has issues dealing with the world around her, as a
character that Telltale meant as the antithesis to Clem—a character who wasn’t
taught to survive in this new world, who wasn’t forced to see the harsh
realities and learn to grow up—but instead, a character that Telltale hated and
simply wanted to suffer, and throwing her away in Episode 4 in a very anticlimactic,
Telltale way by not allowing you to save her, no matter what you do. I was
rooting for Sarah to make it to the end, and simply knowing what Telltale
thought, as well as the harsh treatment of Sarah for no good reason simply
served as a big negative to me.
Kenny is also a character greatly hurt by the poor writing
that tends to plague the last two episodes of the season. After Sarita’s death,
Kenny gets incredibly angry at the world around him. And this is, overall,
pretty understandable. For me, he had to walk into the forest to see that his
wife had shot herself instead of their bitten son who was about to turn, shoot
his son to prevent Duck from turning, watch another young boy reminiscent of
his son who was a Walker, get beaten into a half inch of his life and lost an
eye, and lost the second woman he loved.
To say that Kenny gets it rough is probably a bit of an
understatement, yet throughout episodes four and five, Kenny is constantly
portrayed as unhinged, ready to kill, menacing, and cruel. This isn’t to say
Kenny is a perfect angel, as he never has been, but I feel like Telltale
reduced Kenny to something a lot less than he ever was throughout the entire
series. Even after being portrayed very well at certain points in Episodes 4
and 5, his character as a whole is brought down by what feels like very
inconsistent writing.
To go more onto Episode Five (boy, I’ve been talking a
while, huh?), I felt that the episode had some very good highs, but the lows
were very low, and after being able to sit and think on it, very much hurt my
thoughts on the Season Finale. You start off in the aftermath of the final
choice of Episode Four, pinned down by the Russians who held you up, and with
Jane mysteriously coming back to help out, hold Arvo hostage in order to get to
a shelter, stopping at a busted generator station for the night. This part was
probably one of the best parts of the episode for me, because it was just
simple character development and a bit of an air of ease. After so much that
had happened, the group could just rest and relax, joke around, and talk, and
it felt strangely powerful to me.
The second major choice of the game, helping Luke, was one
that bothered me a lot, because it was a case of a Telltale game death. I had
Clem go over to try and help Luke out, because that’s what she would do to help
her friend, but no matter what I could do (and even if I had chosen the other
option), there was nothing to be done. As soon as that ice starts to break,
Luke is a dead man, killed off in a few seconds, with nothing to do about it.
It’s at this point where Kenny becomes a worse and worse
written character, and the rest of the group trusts him less and less. Upon
finding and fixing an old truck, an argument sparks throughout the group of
where to go, simply leading to more and more tension that wedges a group that’s
been with each other for three episodes now further and further apart, which
just feels for the sake of tension, in a way.
What is probably one of the most confounding story points in
Mike, Bonnie, and Arvo stealing the truck and Arvo shooting Clem and then
leaving to never been seen or heard from again (remember, Bonnie and Mike have
been with you since Episode 3 and have helped you escape Carver’s compound, and
have been shown as primarily trustworthy, helpful, and reliable) ends up
leading to by far the best moment of the episode.
After being shot and falling unconscious, Clem dreams about
being back in the RV with Lee, talking about a bad dream she had, and other
things, such as what makes a person angry, and other topics, and being able to
see young Clem with Lee again brought me pretty darn close to tearing up. It
was a wonderful, serene moment that had me hoping everything from Season One
Episode 3 on was just all an awful dream.
Of course, as is what is one of the running themes of The
Walking Dead, all good things must end, and you wake up to find Jane and Kenny
going at it again, as is the usual this episode. This is where the game
ultimately ends up culminating into—one long string of decisions and choices
that will, ultimately, effect what you do in the end and who you side with.
Upon reaching a rest stop after having to split up to find
fuel, and Jane, Clem, and Alvin Jr. having to escape from Walkers, Jane tells
Clem and Kenny that Alvin Jr. is gone, sparking Kenny to become enraged, and he
ends up fighting with Jane.
This, of course, leads to what feels like the worst Telltale
choice in the season: shoot Kenny and Jane can live, or look away and let Kenny
kill Jane. My Clem was always more of a mediator, preferring not to have to
kill anyone if they could avoid it, only doing so for survival reasons, and
there was no way to talk either of them out of it.
Earlier in the season, Luke talks about how the most
important thing is family, and although I didn’t realize it at first, thinking
back on it, I feel like my choice was at least partially affected by Luke’s
words. Although Kenny had never been the kindest man, due to having been
through a lot, but he was someone I had been with for two whole seasons now.
With Lee gone, Kenny was the closest Clem had to family, especially now with
Alvin Jr. gone.
Of course, after Jane’s death, we find out what is probably
the most dumbfounding revelation: Alvin Jr. was still alive. For whatever
reason, Jane lied to prove some point to Clem, that Kenny was too far gone.
This is the part that really had me upset with the chapter—that the game felt
like Kenny was in the wrong, going so far as to pulling what felt to me like an
odd stunt against Kenny.
The ending was satisfying, and, despite not being with the
whole group, the idea of Clem, Kenny, and Alvin Jr. feels very fitting, and my
biggest issue with the ending is that we never find out what happens to Christa
since Episode One. To me, it seemed much more likely that she would survive the
situation she faced than how Kenny miraculously survived his situation, so her
being omitted throughout the rest of the season was something that bothered me
a bit.
The game does have five different endings. Five very
different endings. In a way it’ll be interesting to see what Telltale does with
Season Three. I wasn’t overly fond of Season Two at a number of points, but it
was a solid game with a solid story, though plagued with very inconsistent
writing and character choices towards the last few episodes.
For reference, my Episode 5 choices were as follows:
3/5
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