[NakeyJakey] Returning to Red Dead Redemption 2

I didn’t notice much character development at all over the course of the game. All that happened was that Arthur lost faith in one guy. I think most of us living humans have been burnt by somebody we trust and learned that lesson by age 20. How Arthur made it into his 30’s before facing his daddy issues is beyond me, but I can’t comprehend on what planet that incredibly juvenile lesson in “Other people don’t always have your best interests at heart” qualifies as “one of the best character developments of all time”. At the very least it doesn’t hold a candle to John Marston’s arc. I mean the same company made GTA IV and Nico Bellic who is another character that is just in a whole different league than Arthur.

Like I could see myself being moved by his character if I myself was 14 when playing through the game. But playing this game for adults in my mid-twenties, it was just not compelling to play this character that was both much older than me, and yet also somehow had the mind of a teenage boy who’s just figured out his parents don’t actually know everything in the universe, and dad’s been cheating on mom.

I would say John is an anti-hero. A good man underneath who genuinely cares for his friends and family but doesn’t know how to live outside of crime. He knows what he wants and he has a goal in life but tragically, he just doesn’t know how to or is incapable of attaining it.

Arthur is more like an idiot ward of the state who does crime because he doesn’t understand the difference between right and wrong. He has no goals, ambitions, or desires. He has no opinion or moral code. He doesn’t want anything and has nothing to work towards. The most humanizing thing about him is his journal, but his entire being amounts to little more than observations of the things around him. He’s like Data from Star Trek, but even Data had a goal, to become more human. Arthur doesn’t give a shit about being human. It’s so… uncompelling.

Problem is the game tries to paint him as either a good guy or a bad guy based on the honor system, but he’s not a good guy or a bad guy or complex guy either. He’s not much of a guy at all. His only driving force in the entire game is a blind trust in his father figure. The only internal conflict he has in the entire game is the extremely late realization in his forties that his “dad” isn’t an all-knowing benevolent entity, but is a flawed, self-serving human just like everyone else, and that he needs to learn to think for himself for once. And once he reaches the stage of independent thought, we’re already done playing as him lol.

I think his character would be much more compelling if Arthur made this transition after the first act, and not the final hour of gameplay. An RDR2 where Arthur has been freed of his entirely being’s reliance on Dutch and a conflict with Dutch taking a bigger role in the plot.

Basically a love letter to rdr2 and how Arthur is a geat character but it nakey jakeys format

They're not a multi-billion dollar company. It's slower. Sometimes, it requires reloads. Always works for me through Firefox. I just have to wait for the video to load. it can take a bit sometimes.