Straight up warning, there will be some spoilers. If you do not want to know about them, stop RIGHT HERE:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So I had, for about a year, Red Dead Redemption. And I'm confused. It's really not that solid a game. I mean it was fun, but the horse riding controls were insanely wonky. And frankly, I think shooting some crook in BOTH knees should prevent him from being able to escape. I can't tell you how many times the Bounty got away because I couldn't kill his goons fast enough, or that every time I thought I was 'safe' enough to make a capture, I ate enough lead to make my dick into a pencil.
But really those are minor gripes compared to the bait and switch the game pulls on you. I don't mind if the main character dies, but I want it to mean 'something' not be an excuse to play another character. I didn't want to be Jake. I couldn't stand the whiny git. What's worse is that there's no way you could know it was coming, it felt cheap and pointless to me. Like I said an excuse to change characters.
When it happened, and I got to play Jack, I paused the game. Waited. Then powered off the console, ejected the disk and gave the game back to my friend. I normally stop playing when I realize I'm not having fun (Final Fantasy 10 was like that, at one point I realized I was just going through the motions, I wasn't actually having any fun), but RDR is the first game that made me so mad that I stopped trusting Rockstar. I simply do not trust them not to do that again on me.
Maybe it's an overreaction, but I honestly, I rather liked the story, I could ignore the silly horse controls, or the fact that the Dead Eye controls let me kill every living thing within 30 seconds of me (my aim kinda sucks), as long as I could see more of John's story. But the moment it stopped being his story, I was no longer interested in playing it.
I'm sure Jake isn't that bad a character, but I wasn't interested in him, there was nothing built up with him. My emotional investment was with John, I had gone through 40 hours (total, including restarts and deaths) with him, and the ties he made to the people around him. But Jake? I didn't want to do that again, nor was I finished with John's story, despite his reunion with his family.
I'm also one of those people who will have his game experience ruined if the ending sucks. Mass Effect 3, the reason I haven't picked it up is because every ending that I spoiled for myself isn't worth the time investing into the game. It could be the awesomest game in the entire universe, but if the last 5 minutes suck dead donkey balls, the rest of the game also feels like wasted time to me, time I could have spent getting a 'better' story somewhere else.
This is just my opinion, I could be wrong.
