South Park: The Fractured But Whole

I very much enjoyed playing through The Fragmented But Whole. It seems to be doing less well with critics than its predecessor, but I think that’s quite a lot to do with the post-Gamergate obsession with avoiding triggering people meaning that anything edgy or offensive must be docked a few points, no matter how self-aware it may be about that. However, as a game, a story and a role-playing experience, I found it far more satisfying than The Stick of Truth.

There are certainly disappointments. I didn’t find the fart powers of the first game amusing, so it was a bit disappointing to find out that you continue as the same character with the same central ability – even if later there’s a kind of plot explanation for it. There was also a lot in the trailer that didn’t materialise in the game – Mint Berry Crunch is absent, probably not to appear until a later DLC; Mysterion is not the nemesis he was presented as, and is in fact a very minor character here; PC Principal is not the teased berserker boss but in his usual role of spewing social commentary and tacking a random quicktime event move onto the combat system; even though you’re told you can ‘pick a side’, unlike the first game you don’t get to make a decision whether to side for one faction or the other, so there’s never really any sense of picking a side. Well, there is one scene late in the game where you have a choice to make, which I don’t think makes any difference to the game whatsoever, but may be the game’s most harrowing and memorable, with a sudden shift in tone and humour supplied only by its juxtaposition with the other comedic elements around it.

For its flaws and broken promises, though, I think this game is considerably better than the last one.

Firstly, it’s just much more fun to play. The first game was an extremely simple RPG system which became pretty pointless as soon as you got some teammates with overpowered abilities – all you had to do was get Kyle and one-shot everything with arrows. Here, the Final Fantasy Tactics-style grid battle system with teammates and ranges to consider was much, much more compelling and fun. Yes, I had a team to steamroll the regular enemies I met, but bosses needed some strategy changes. Not only the hidden boss in the burrito shop (who was a fun challenge) but even some of the regular bosses were actually pretty difficult to adjust to, especially the larger ones. Hands down, that makes this a much more enjoyable game to play.

I could forgive the first game being simplistic, though, when the story was fun. Again, I think this game improves on the last. The first may have had a slightly clearer storyline – the MacGuffin has to be retrieved – but it suffered from being heavily fragmented by weird sequences at night and trips away from South Park. This game unfolds like an episode of the show, starting from a mundane adventure that lightly mocks pop culture (Cartman and Co, having squabbled with the other kids who were playing superhero, decide the way to get their superhero franchise started is by getting the reward money for finding a cat) and then spiralling out into something far bigger (a mysterious figure is uniting the crime bosses in the town to cause a crime wave and oust the current mayor). The twists are predictable, especially if you’ve ever seen Unbreakable, but that’s part of the parody, really. It was also a bit more believable in the first game that the whole thing was an exaggeration in the minds of the kids – something the show did some great jokes about in the past – but that’s something the player can quickly accept.

The personal story of the main character is also more satisfying. It builds upon the first game, yes, and you have to look past all that unfunny fart-power humour, but under the guise of ‘filling in your character sheet’ and ‘giving the superhero a tragic backstory’, a lot of this game revolves around figuring out the character’s identity and past. A lot of that is poking fun at current identity politics, where everyone is extremely sensitive about being politically correct about people’s self-identification, and the South Park politics remains centrist and observational – it mocks the bigots who will attack someone’s identity no matter what it is and famously put a joke right that the start that life is easier for white people, but it also revels in classic offensive stereotypes, small-town mentality and the idea that political correctness is all a bit daft and just as brutishly self-righteous as those infamous sexist frats. Through it all, your main character comes over as sympathetic and sweet, even staying mute except for a cute little sigh when he eats dinner as his parents fight.

It’s remarkable, really, how South Park is perhaps the first major game where you can actually customise your 10-year-old character in any number of ways – gay, pansexual, gender-neutral, any nationality you want – regardless of whether it’s tongue-in-cheek or not. I also have to talk about Tweek and Craig. The series started by poking fun at fandom and the tendency for there to be gay porn about any show with a lot of male characters. Neither Tweek nor Craig considered themselves gay, and didn’t get it at all. When the town got depressed when they faked a break-up, they decided to stay together for the sake of others while not really being gay. And yet recent episodes and this game have pushed away from that. It’s actually a major subplot of the story – Tweek leaves with the ‘Freedom Pals’ while Craig stays with Coon and Friends. The schism causes them to break up, where they bicker for a while but adorably keep asking the main character how their ex is getting on in between the bitterness. Finally they go to couples’ counselling, in typical daft South Park-style, and their special attack becomes a hilarious and adorable pastiche of Japanese BL (which, by the way, nobody has called ‘yaoi’ for a very long time). But they begin to express themselves, publically and privately, not as fake boyfriends but with genuine affection. If anything, the relationship is treated with the most respect just about anything has ever been given in South Park. Partly it remains a joke, that the one thing respected in the writing is the forced love affair between two 10-year-old boys pushed together by fangirls, but that doesn’t stop it being strange to see this show of all shows making something incredibly cute and progressive.

A lot of this is built out of a pretty weak season for South Park. Season 20 seems to be known in the fandom – which I’m not really part of – as a very weak one. Parker and Stone never expected Trump to win so a lot of their plans had to be changed. They struggled doing a season-long storyline that was a mess of ideas about trolls, ’member berries and Cartman turning over a new leaf after getting a girlfriend, which ended up with a lot of badly-explored ideas. For example, tensions between the sexes plus protests over the National Anthem (with a touch of Harambe) culminated in Butters’ ‘Wieners Out’ movement. The boys disgusted the girls, got what they wanted and were even protected by the PC Principal approving their right to protest peacefully. Then Butters tried it again, got told it wasn’t the right time by the Principal and the whole plotline vanished with the girls never able to give a decent response, which came over as a bit weird. Some of that unevenness finds its way into this game with very little actual thought going into Wendy’s presence or the actual underlying problems with South Park’s rotten underbelly and extremely uneven power structures.

But primarily the question is whether this is a fun game and a solid tie-in. I think it succeeds at both. Yes, it’s still a bit too short, but it’s longer and more satisfying than its predecessor. It’s also funnier and more human. So I unhesitatingly say that in my opinion, it’s better than The Stick of Truth. 

South Park: The Stick of Truth

I didn’t get the South Park game when it came out, even though I heard a lot of positive things and have been enjoying the show since it first started airing in the US – with a few hiccups here and there as the show went off the rails for a while. The Stick of Truth didn’t appeal for two reasons – firstly, I had a huge backlog of games I wanted to play at that time. But secondly, and more importantly, I refused to spend money on an incomplete game, and in the UK several sequences were cut out because someone somewhere deemed them inappropriate. Total bullshit, especially because one late-game sequence disarming a bomb recalls one of the cut sequences and thus makes very little sense.

But I’ve been a lot more into South Park since the new season began and The Fractured But Whole seems a lot of fun. Plus if I preorder, I get The Stick of Truth for free. So that’s what I did, and knowing that it was a very short game, played it through. The censorship, repetitive combat and simple story mean I’m happy to play it through just once and forget it (I sided with Kyle and the elves, for the record), but I actually rather enjoyed the 8 or 9 hours I gave this game. Ordinarily I don’t feel like I’ve really finished a game and can write my review until I’ve seen everything it has to offer and usually gotten the platinum, but in this case just a single run was adequate. Which isn’t to say it was a cursory speed-run: I finished all the side-quests but one (didn’t find the last hobo) and did pretty well on the collection and completion sidequests too. But I don’t think I’ll be going back for more.

The game was fun. Visually, it is of course just like an episode of the TV show. That isn’t the greatest of feats, given the show’s famously simplistic style. The acting is of course delivered by the show’s main cast, and probably the main draw, with the same crude humour, occasionally clever satirical parts and lots of nods to the show’s past – even right back to the beginning at times, with callbacks to very old episodes through elements like the stuffed and mounted Scuzzlebutt. And the gameplay is a satisfying rendition of classic turn-based RPGs, with combat revolving mostly around status ailments. Honestly, the game was far, far too easy. There was only one fight that I found challenging, which was against Al Gore and his bodyguards, which I had to concentrate for because if I didn’t defend against the enemy’s attacks with perfect timing I lost. But that was the one and only time that the game presented anything even a little difficult, and once Kyle joins the party his most powerful attack just wiped everyone out like the Magus Sisters in Final Fantasy X.

So with the presentation as would be expected from modern games, and the gameplay not so great, what about the story? Well, that’s certainly the saving grace of the game and what keeps the player coming back, though it’s not exactly the best story ever. The charm is that the boys are playing at being fantasy characters, from the Black Friday episodes of the show. They have split into two factions, the humans – led by Cartman – and the elves – led by Kyle.

The player, as a new kid, meets Butters and through him joins Cartman’s faction. He learns to fight, and in a parody of Skyrim that goes way too far and dominates too much of the game despite not being funny, he uses magical farts to get an advantage in battle. Thus he goes around town beating up bullies, rats and homeless people and making friends on Facebook. After causing disaster on an alien spaceship that abducts him for a bit of anal probing – censored in Europe – our hero ends up having to contend with an alien virus that has disastrous and very South Park-ish effects on the town’s population, as well as the secret government agents who want to hush the whole thing up.

The parodies of classic games are certainly enjoyable. While the turn-based combat evokes Final Fantasy, the mute main character is more like Link and there’s a whole section that’s essentially a tribute to Zelda. The show’s climax with betrayals and revelations and big firey battles with recognisable old faces is satisfying, too.

South Park may be puerile and at times push a joke too far when it’s not actually that entertaining, but generally it’s the added layers that a joke gets that are amusing. Gross-out humour about Mr. Slave’s butt isn’t very funny, but seeing an old face long missing from the show in an unexpected place gets a laugh. The edgy humour of fighting through an abortion clinic isn’t so amusing, but getting cornered into having to pretend to do an abortion on Randy Marsh by your cover story makes it much funnier (though again gets censored). The game also did the fashionable thing of playing with the notion of free will, like Bioshock or Spec Ops: The Line, but for a funny sequence with a very creepy photographer.

Initially satisfying to explore with lots of combat to learn, it’s a shame there isn’t a mode that’s much more challenging, and that there couldn’t be considerably more variety in the battles – and a lot less farting. We’ll see how game 2 measures up tomorrow!