User blog comment:Dava4444/Bioshock Infinite .. thoughts../@comment-190.159.194.5-20130618201531/@comment-186.155.140.116-20130618233415

Oh, I know what an oxymoron is. And here are my beefs with what he is saying. Apart from the rushed writing and poor grammar, the concept of people hanging on to the first game and it's ideals when playing Infinite is simply wrong. BioShock Infinite is a much more character-focused game than the first one. In BioShock, Jack was nothing more than a walking plot device as the game centered around Rapture and it's inhabitants. In BioShock, it was about Rapture. In Infinite, it was about Booker and Elizabeth (and to some extent, the Luteces as well) and everything and everyone else were just there to complement them, which was probably Levine's idealistic approach to the story from the beginning. "Dava4444" doesn't even mention them here, and seems deluded by the idea that the main total focus of both games seems to be Comstock and Ryan. And there are some things here that are just flat out wrong and don't make sense. How was the game short in any way? unless he decided to somewhat rush through every area without scavenging anything, collecting any voxophones etc. the game clocks in almost about as long as the first one.

He seems intended to paint Andrew Ryan as some sort of mary sue-ish character as well, whom no one in Columbia could even approach in terms of idealism. The first game was dead set on proving Ryan's approach and extremist ways wrong. He wasn't an absolute genius nor was he certainly "charismatic" by the time you meet him. He's a deeply flawed, smug, angry, insane monarch who rules a dead city and keeps clinging to it and believing that it's in recovery somehow, even when it's in ruins and abandoned by all except Big Daddies, Little Sisters and Splicers, and a tyrant with a dream that was doomed to fail from the beginning, he wasn't even the main bad guy and he got played like a fiddle by Fontaine. In fact, who is it that comes out from the events of both games alive and unscathed? Tenenbaum. Not Ryan, not Fontaine, Tenebaum. In regards to Comstock, I doubt that when Levine was creating him he was thinking "Oh boy how can I make him as cool as Ryan?" he wasn't supposed to be Ryan 2.0 and, apart from the fact that both are rulers of their perspective city, you'll see that they have barely anything in common.

Oh, and "expecting a climatic boss fight with Comstock"? did he play a different BioShock than the rest of us? from what I remember, all you did was meet Ryan, share a few bits of plot-revealing dialogue and smack him to death with a golf club in a non-controllable scene. It's pretty much the same with Comstock, except that you drown him instead. Did he want Comstock to pump up on Vigors at the last minute and become a super-monster in the same vein as Fontaine? you know, that ending boss fight that was considered very underwhelming?

Look, I'm not gonna act like BioShock Infinite is the best game of all time, but neither was BioShock. I am so sick and tired of people treating it like a flawless gem and using that as the main and sole defense when judging it's followers. As good as it was, the game's biggest drawback was it's disappointing last act. You know, after Ryan kicks the bucket it becomes much more less intricate and engaging since it has passed it's emotional climax, it drags on, there is no new material and the new areas (Olympus Heights, Apollo Square, Point Prometheus) are all rather boring and disappointing compared to enviroments like the Medical Pavilion and Arcadia.