That Alice twist is almost as dumb as the killer being one of the player characters in Heavy Rain. It's one of those twists that a writer has because they think stories needs twists
Honestly, I think this plot twist was going to be a commentary on the very real moral grey area that is P. Doe Files purchasing childlike "real dolls" for the purposes of... well, you know. This is the only way for the twist to work, as Kara could have chosen to forget Alice was an android because if she was human, she would have a chance to grow up and escape the Phil Spector-esque father. Knowing David Cage's work history, I'm almost positive this was the intended storyline and why Kara's plot seems like such an afterthought. I would put money on David Cage being talked out of this subplot by Adam Williams, knowing that there would be no way Cage would be capable of handling such dark subject matter without... you know... being himself. I'm also assuming that such a storyline might be the bridge too far for most countries and result in the game being banned. Australia actually banned... "Alice Dolls" in 2019, a year after this game came out. OH, Alice in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carol, suddenly makes a much more sensical metaphor now, huh?
@@coachacola3755 We were in the mind of the perpetrator while he was trying to hide proofs, and somehow his thought did not reveal this. Was he so paranoid that he feared a telepath listening? It didn't seem to be a sci-fi/fantasy story...
I really do hate the android child twist. That path of the story with those characters, up to that point, had been about an android "mother" figure and a child relying on eachother and becoming a family as they try to escape and make a new life somewhere else. Not exactly the most original thing, but it was still fairly nice. You could get behind it emotionally. And then the twist happens. Now it's a child-android programmed to be a child being a child, and a caretaker-android programmed to be a caretaker being a caretaker. There is no character growth, no emotional resonance, they're just a pair of robots that haven't left their predesignated roles in the slightest. It just completely ruins that part of the story, made it so that I couldn't take anything to do with those characters seriously anymore.
I hated the fact that they purposely blur the twist (magazine ) in the beginning of the game. That's not how you do it people! That's how you get shitty twists in stories
I’m so late to this game, but the clenched fist or Black Power Fist has been a thing in black activist spaces since the 60’s. Like it very much predates the BLM movement, which just makes it even more wild that DC chose to use that symbol like wow bro
It has been a symbol much longer, and been used all around the world. The black activists didn't invent it in the 60s, they used an already recognised symbol of fighting against oppression.
@@Jack.OffermanBut it’s clearly an analogy to the civil rights nonevent, happening in DETROIT, standing people in the back of the bus. I mean, it’s really obvious.
Well she can shoot Todd in one of the routes but I mean she doesn’t seem aware like Kara does and androids are supposed to have amazing intelligence. After all the abuse it’s hard to think she hasn’t deviated. 1:47
yeah she also never really acknowledges being an android? as in obviously she never mentions it before the reveal but even afterwards there’s zero discussion about it with her
@@M_IAWIA correct. And if you insist on talking to her, she says that if she tells you then "you wouldn't love me anymore". It`s easy to miss. I found this dialogue on the fifth playthrough
There's one fan theory I've heard that I think could've resulted in a more emotionally satisfying ending. It states that Elijah Kamski (the founder of Cyberlife) was the one who created deviants and that he wanted the revolution to occur. There's even confirmation that Markus was gifted to Carl Manfred by Kamski. Not only does this sort of answer the big question to Connor's mystery, but it could also add to a crisis for the androids. Do they legitimately have emotions, or was it all just programmed by Kamski. I once imagined a scene in which Markus confronts Kamski, asking questions to his creator.
Ich glaube es macht Sinn, hätte Kamski die Deviants programmiert, um ein Ass im Ärmel zu haben, sollte er aus CyberLife herausgewoefen werden. So kam es auch und Kamsky konnte wieder in eine ranghohe Position aufrücken. Falls es nicht klappt, hätte er CyberLife aus Rache geschadet.
I heard about that theory. Did you realise that while androids break out of they're programs we can see random numbers and sometimes there is one that repeats, its RA9. And I one of the promo videos, Kamski 2028, kamski talks about androids begin able to learn. And when journalist asks him if hes not afraid that those androids will rebel, and he mas like: Nah there is no way! Thats just silly. :) Yeahhh... definitly. I think he added the RA9 as the code of soul. And It would be nice to find out in one of the endings, that all androids are concious but they are all in sort of "Asleep mode" That's why they can fell stress. I always wondered why they system gats dissable. It seems to not help them deal with they roles. It's more like, make's them more human like, but weaker at the same time.
They confirm it in some endings, Elijah created deviancy and Markus to become ra9 so that an android revolution would arise, and he would come up with a patch to fix it which reinstates him as CEO of CyberLife. If the revolution fails and the androids explode Detroit, his house is basically a bunker far from it all. He wins either way
@@beetothebop123 I remember that, but there’s also an ending where it’s basically revealed that Cyberlife engineered the revolution for pretty much no reason.
They do have a "kill switch", in the first chapter we learn that each android has a deactivation code but it doesn't work on deviants (how convenient).
Was rather nice spending the evening watching this, if only cause it made me feel kinda validated in how much this game really conflicted with me. I went in having pretty low expectations, but I'm still a sucker for cyberpunk vibes. Was surprised by how much I enjoyed the scenes of Connor and Hank especially (like if their whole shtick was the entire game, it would have been a great campy bit of fun), but... I won't go into details, but being a victim of domestic abuse myself, Kara's story was so disturbing, especially getting one of her bad endings. It screwed me up so bad and had me in a disassociative state for a whole week before I just had an emotional breakdown and was sobbing for a whole night, not because I felt like "wow, what an emotionally moving story" but because "this game has taken me back to an extremely dark place in my life that I thought no longer haunted me". But at the same time, the game did something that was incredible, particularly to me as a musician. For the soundtrack, each character had their own composer handling their music. While that in and of itself is really cool, where that shined especially was how that was integrated in set pieces where the different characters would meet. My fave example being one where Kara is on the run from the cops and gets tracked down by Connor and Hank. The music playing in that scene is a collaborative composition between those character's composers that works in elements and lemotifs from Connor and Kara's themes, It's nothing short of incredible in how much it heightens the tension and drama of that scene and is something I've yet to be seen done in any other game. And it's so frustrating how such a compelling idea is in a game that doesn't feel like it deserves it at all. But I digress. I don't regret playing the game as it added to how to think about stories in games on the with both in what's compelling and what's horrifying, but damn is it rough trying to find a mental balance when you find a game awful but also love aspects in it.
I can vibe with that and the OST deserves its own lengthy deep dive in its own right. Detroit is easily the most palatable of QD's games and it tries to build a world that feels lived in.
Why...dose that single man.. have a robot child? Why are they building robot children? Why, if these robots are domestic servents, did they make them filly human and not the far far FAR cheaper roomba with arms?
I feel like David Cage has some interesting ideas that could be done well. But I think he takes what is a solid foundation and then as puts pen to paper (or after several drinks) he has a lot of "oh what if" ideas and then tries to cram them all together and then we get a mixed product in the end. But to be fair I do see the potential in each of his games.
Writers like David Cage need someone they trust and respect who can tell them what works and doesn't, and what to cut. A situation auteurs rarely land in due to ego.
The next time I play this game, I'm going to have Kara obey Todd - resulting in both her and Alice's death, Marcus being an absolute failure at being a leader (he was a caretaker, for pity's sake - not a leader!) and do my best to keep Connor and Hank on good terms (not sure how Kara/Alice's absence and Marcus' ineptitude will affect the Hank/Connor storyline).
Well, him getting the android daughter could have had a potential to be explained in a way, where he bought her so that he could feel less alone but also owning a punching bag who he could unleash his wrath upon. He hates androids so him getting an android child to abuse could have been a thing in there, it would make sense. But that option died when he caught Kara and accused her of "stealing his little girl", which resulted in the nonsense which was described in this video. Where he hates androids, because they stole his job, he is angry that he had to get Kara as a house cleaner (the irony of his job being stolen by an android and buying an android to do work at his house), but also buying an android child to take care of
It's so funny at the end when Luther is almost like, trying to tell Kara that it's okay if Alice is an android...she's still her daughter - like?? Kara is ALSO an android. Also, can androids NOT tell when someone else is an android? How is Todd[?] so broke but still wasting money on buying and repairing androids to beat up? Why does he behave as if Alice actually is a little girl but treats Kara like she's just a machine? It's a twist that brings up so many more questions than answers and also doesn't matter - what a weird writing decision. I wonder how the game would have changed if Kara's storyline began with Alice coming home from being repaired. Like, if we knew Alice was a robot from the beginning. Or even if the roles were switched and Kara was a human housekeeper for Todd yet took Alice and ran anyway because she couldn't stand seeing Todd hurt her.
@@buzzinbea The more you think about it the more wrong there is found with it, isn't it? Like...we could possibly explain Alice reveal as a denial, but I would say it goes straight out the window since Kara found the magazine before she went deviant. Also has Alice always been deviant? She didn't act like a robot since the beginning. Since she is a robot, she should know her own functions therefore also just turn off her temperature sensors or something when she was cold af. Like...they surely come with instructions, but they have all sorts of info downloaded into them, and don't tell me that there wasn't space for that in the child model. If you find more stuff wrong I didn't notice... let's dig that shit out
what frustrates me most about the alice twist is that the story structure SHOULD be so obvious! with the three main characters, we have connor on the human side and then markus on the android side, so it fits thematically to have kara and alice being a midpoint between the two; proving that despite all the conflict androids and humans CAN coexist. it’s not exactly complex or original but it works, whereas having alice turn out to be an android is like??? what’s the message?? that androids can love each other? we already know that from other moments in the game. if it’s supposed to pose some philosophical question of ‘could you still love an android child’ then that’s unbelievably stupid because we literally play as three androids and we’re very obviously supposed to be feeling sympathetic for them. the whole twist is just cage shooting himself in the foot for the sake of a ‘gotcha’ moment for the players
I described this game to my friends as "a story about oppression made by people who have never actually experienced oppression" I kept cringing playing this game. It felt racist because I don't believe the game convinced me that andriods are people. Plus the Holocaust references? yeeesh
i hate that the "alice is actually an android" twist makes karas sacrifices practically worthless/done for nothing, like what u chose has no impact on the story despite it being a game where ur choices are supposed to matter
People are you crazy? Does twist MAKE the sacrafice worthless? I feel like nobody ever thought about the meaning of Karas storyline. Do you want to say, what if Alice was a human, Kara would not be like the kidnapper? All she needed to do was to take human Alice from Tod (he is possibly dead after that) and give Alice to the police or something. Kara forces Alice to sleep in the old car at rain, sleep in the old house with the maniac (she does it 3 TIMES IN A ROW) or to witness an armed robbery (i think it is quite traumatic for the child). Kara is so desperate, that she is like literally ready to kill Alice by runnig on the highway, only to not get caught by the police. Doesn't human Alice has mom? Doesn't USA has some kind of orphan houses? It is Kara who is going to be destroed, not Alice. Kara do that only for herself, it was no love in it, more like ownership. In fact the twist is literally the only thing that makes her story not so worthless (and not so creepy. Imagine if Tod and Kara switched the genders).
My biggest issue with Detroit Become Human is how I can't see the androids as sentient. To me they don't show enough truly sentient characteristics for me to view them as anything more than soulless robots. I will never see an Ai in the real world as being sentient. I just don't think it is at all possible. But I can set that aside with some suspension of disbelief if it makes a story better. But I just can't do it for DBH because the robots are just... Bad. They're not interesting characters. They literally feel like Ai that have read a few textbooks on revolutions, or parenting, or police investigations and just replicated it like ChatGPT. Marcus's story was slightly ok, the scene of him crying as Painter Guy (don't remember his name, he wasn't interesting) was fairly humanizing. But outside of that he's just the most generic revolutionary I can think of. A single good scene paired with a hundred other mediocre ones just makes you forget the good scene. It's made even worse when during the news broadcast he turns off his skin, revealing his metal/plastic body. I'm supposed to be seeing this machine as on the same conscious level as human and you're removing the most humanizing element of its appearance????? Kara's story made my eyes glaze over by the sheer boredom of it all. I don't like to use the word boring to describe a story, but it's really the only word that properly expresses my disdain for this plotline. Kara's story is just so, so boring. I do not care for Kara, I would gladly cave in Alice's head with a claw hammer, I can't even remember the name of any other characters in it. Nevermind the fact that the twist of Alice being an android completely ruins the entire theme of the storyline. Connor's story was goin' good, it was goin' great. It was near the end of the game I started to think "Connor might actually be sentient, he truly has free will. He's not some deviant, he's a real pers- ok what the fuck was that twist?" For some reason right at the end of Connor's campaign it's revealed that he was created specifically to be deviant so that they could study deviants better. So he's not sentient. He just has less rules to follow than the other soulless robots. They just went into his code and deleted a few lines saying he can't hold a gun or talk back. So this story that has the primary theme of "Robots can be sentient" fails to show any sentient robots.
The issues you brought up here, I had the same sentiment. Kara's story was interesting at first but realizing after a while that her story hardly intertwines with Connor's or Markus', I got bored with hers, and it didn't help that Alice ended up being just another android. If the game was just gonna force Kara to be a robot mom on the run with her kid, then she was better off just being a minor character that Connor has to deal with, not a playable character. And anytime Markus' story came up, it felt more and more like an annoyingly long cinematic that you can't skip. And he becomes Robo-Jesus for the dumbest reason possible: going out for supplies is somehow such a grand idea that no other android could possibly think of! He's a borderline Gary Stu and the ability that he has to just switch androids from machine to "deviant" goes against the "become human" aspect and could easily make him more like a villain than a savior. (Imo he's more interesting as an android devil than RoboJesus) It's been said TO DEATH but Connor's story is the best out of the three, he actually comes closet to embodying the "become human" theme of the game and actually goes through events that force him to think about his own sentience and purpose, not to mention he comes across as more an Ra9 type than Markus, he's the one that truly frees all the Cyberlife androids if you play him as a deviant - not Markus. Connor is the one who finds the sculpture (also a Jericho clue) at the Ortiz crime scene, and it is HIM who is confronted with the "human or machine" question by Kamski. For some reason, Connor was given the majority of the narratively important scenes that ask the BIG question, not successfully mind you, but still.
I feel like a perfect microcosm of David Cage's mentality on making games is actually in the gameplay. He seems to recognize that he's actually making movies and not games for like 90% of their runtime so he's like "Fuck we need to have the player do something" so he just has the player push buttons pointlessly in order to keep the story going the way he wants it to. Rarely do you get a chance to actually provide an input that actually changes things, but if you actually cut out all the pointless QTEs that just stop the game from pausing itself every 10 seconds, you would have a "game" that is a series of 30+ minute long cutscenes where the player then makes a single choice at the end to determine what cutscene to play next. \ It just shows that he has no comprehension for how to actually make a game or let the player actually make their own story, because he's too wrapped up in wanting to tell his own story, despite him constantly posturing on about how he wants players to make their own stories. But he cannot see past himself, so we end up being forced to play a role in his stories where logic and basic common sense goes out the window, just hitting buttons to move onto the next cutscene. Meanwhile I've had more narratively engaging stories created through gameplay playing games like Civilization than I have with anything in Cage's catalogue.
33:28 That's funny, because games have been a mature way of telling stories even as far back as the late 90s/early 2000s. Games like KOTOR 1 and 2, Metal Gear Solid 1-4, Starcraft 1 and Brood War, Warcraft 3 and Frozen Throne, Mass Effect 1-3, Elder Scrolls 4 and 5, among others, have gripping, mature storylines that can give any major movie a run for its money. I'd say that the gaming medium has evolved past the movies, because they can tell stories in a way that movies or books can't.
great video! if i had to chime in, what really pissed me off in the story was how alice was revealed to be an android. establishing a child-android dynamic where kara actually had developed a sense of responsibility for who she thought was a human child would have eventually proven that humans and androids COULD co-exist with one another. giving the story the twist that alice was an android completely abolished that belief because now we know that they're not actually even deviating from their roles; kara takes care of alice because that's what she was meant to do; take care of children and be a nanny. alice was attached to kara because that's what she is meant to do; she is a child who attaches to anyone who takes care of her. to be honest, that plot twist ruined the entire kara storyline for me because coming in with the idea that alice was a human gave us a reason to protect and care for her, but also to stay alive in general to be able to do those things; now that we know that she's actually a machine----she's replaceable, not an actual human being, and ruins the plot.
A game that offers you the freedom to choose your story where the developers lecture you on why their story is the correct. No QuanticDream, I DON'T think robots are living beings let alone people and no I DON'T think they deserve to be anything other than servants for humanity as they were designed to be.
12:36 It's actually funny, because the only reason for these stories to take place side by side is because the choices in one could affect the other, but the paths are predetermined in many instances. Only the Kara path seems to rely on other paths' choices. It would make sense for instance, that Hank would try to convince Connor to join the Deviants if they're peaceful, but it would also make sense that Hank and Captain Allen would support Connor putting North/Markus down with a sniper rifle if the Deviant Androids are violent upstarts. But that's not the case. It doesn't matter if Markus goes full Ghandhi or Che Guevara, a ''good'' Connor will join him against the humans, because Hank will turn on you if you remain loyal to humanity, even if the android revolutionaries are violent upstarts, and Hank will support Connor activating the androids, even if it's to support a violent, anti-human revolution. The way things are, it would make more sense if they adopted the Sonic Adventure 2/Sonic '06 route of making each character's story its own thing, and you have to finish it the whole way through before playing the other characters' storylines. Like how you can play through the Dark path in SA2 before you choose the Light path. They should've done that for this game. Have the Connor story path, then have the Kara path, then the Markus path, each as separate parts of the story that you can play the whole way through.
The manufacturer in this story really did master the infuriating trait of a child saying “I’m not hungry” after you busting ass to get them something to eat.
Detroit has some great moments, and _some_ great characters... wrapped up in a story that is at its core exceptionally dumb and requires so many leaps of logic to make work that it is a shame Connor was wasted on this game.
David Cage reminds me a lot of Steven Moffat. Brilliant ideas, but if you put him in charge without anyone reigning him in, everything he does becomes a tangled mess.
It seems the Quantic Dream journey is not over now that we know that Star Wars Eclipse is coming up in the future... I couldn't help but laugh when I saw the trailer ends and there was Quantic Dream logo showing up,. Other than that, great job on the reviews as always!
War, war never changes... At least it's going to be about 5 years before we see how they "ruin" the franchise. Because we all know that SW is a bastion for exquisite storytelling. Yes that previous line is sarcasm.
@@ScottsGameAsylumThere's a lot of great SW stories, but I don't expect anything new to be great. Most of the good stuff happened in the early 2000s.
Watched this video after finishing Detroit, and found myself agreeing with a lot of what you said. I wanted to say thanks for putting together that list of games that handle mature topics. I just finished Detention and really enjoyed it, and am about to boot up Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Night In The Woods is also on my list. Very much appreciate those recommendations!
What I hate the most about Detroit is that it doesn't understand it's own motifs. I get it that Cage just needed some kind of opressed group in his story so he has characters to put in some miserable situations. I actually belive that it could have worked if he put some thought into what it means to be android or human. At one point Connor says that androids don't have feelings, they just simulate them So it could be the case that humans neglect obvious situations when robots get attached to children they care for, or when they create art. There could be a talk show where some corporate experts argue against some niche android rights movement. In fact this is a direction where the opening scene leads us, android got attached to the girl, fears to be replaced and snaps when it happens. But this whole concept is just thrown off the window because Cage needs to have his "gaining freedom" moment and more important, this stuuupid conversions on the spot, performed by Markus. And this breaks the entire concept of becoming human because humanity is just a flip of a switch in this game. Why should anyone in this world care about those beings rights, when they always act like machines and just go on killing spree from time to time. Their memories can be erased and memories transmitted to another body. There are entire series of androids that not only look the same but are meant for the same task (Cara is a standard house cleaner). There are robots adapted to work in extreme temperatures and for gods sake, children can have their cold sensors turned off. They are clearly different than humans. But those topics become only a plot device and game just wants us to assume, that android are human because they cry, care for other beings and don't like being beaten. I guess that David Cage belives that humans and pets are exactly the same. How this game dares to ask questions like "decide if you are a human or a machine" and then show that you gain humanity by a) getting it transmitted to you, or b) being beaten and abused? This becomes even more absurd after the scene with Kamski. General concept would be ok if being human aspect was nuanced, see if a robot amakes a cruel but pragmatic decision. It feels dramatic because Connor can shoot a helpless android girl in the face. But think about it, why should he think she is more than a machine? She is one of the identical androids in the house, just mindlesly walks and kneels, being completely indifferent being held on the gunpoint. Even if there is a process of becoming more than a machine, there is no reason to think she is on that path. If she panicked, or showed any emotion, it would make sense but It falls apart because the game makes you assume that always android==human. At the same time it contradicts itself, suggesting that androids "become" humans. I don't expect Cage to write a philosophical piece with profound discussion about what it means to be human. Story about robots doesn't need to be one, in order to be consistent and fun. But this game just can't make up its mind about it's own rules. Instead it just mindlessly chews on complicated topics, using them as a mere estetic and an excuse to put characters in difficult, emotional situations. This applies both for s-f and opression themes. And it frustrates me so much because almost any deeper thought that i heard about this game, comes not from it's execution or writing but from topics that it's based on. When someone says that Detroit provoked them to think about being human, or media manipulation, or what is art, or will machines take our jobs or whatever, remember that it's just because game threw that topic in their face. It never discusses any of that on any meaningful level.
The one thing that I've wondered is how Detroit: Become Human could've been better. In my opinion, all stories have the potential to be good, even bad ones. As an aspiring writer and filmmaker, a tactic I have used is taking a failed story that had a decent premise and making it reach its potential. However, the games of David Cage feel so bad that they seem impossible to fix. What would you do to improve his games (specifically the plot and characters)?
The one bit of criticism that I do have with this video is that it's implied that Kamski wanted the androids he created to deviate. That's why he didn't create a separate "kill switch", as you called it, to shut them down if they go against their programming.
If you watched the video, the context behind that comment is part of a landslide of ideas that could have been part of the story. And the dark age of Camelot punchline should inform that this was sarcasm
David cage is a genius at creating immersion and atmosphere but needs to spend more time on his writing, regardless I’ve always enjoyed his games and they are very entertaining despite their flaws and I look forward to his next game.
David Cajee hid key components in the game to "trick you"- AGAIN. It would be better if the player was given the opportunity to find the magazine on their own, maybe shoved in the trash? Tricking the player tends to make us feel..... Hmmmmm what's the word... Non Immersive
@@ScottsGameAsylum Honestly, I was quite shocked by your Videos, because I've never seen Anyone talk badly about any of those Games. Granted, I was basically a child when I played Heavy Rain & Beyond, but all the German TH-camrs I watched at the time had nothing but good things to say about these Titles. As for Detroit, the 'Plot Twist' with Alice being a Robot was really the only thing I thought was kinda off, the other Highlighted Issues didn't really bother me. The abrupt change of Pace in-between different scenes for example, there was probably only one point in the Game where I was surprised by the scene ending.
Detroit is the best game of the bunch for sure. I genuinely enjoyed my time the first couple of playthroughs. Sadly thats when the cracks start to appear.
@@TheZedrem I'm guessing the German translation added a lot to the stupid story. Wouldn't have fixed the plot, but if you get talented enough writers on the job and you can really polish up a turd.
How does this game have worse animations than a game that came out five years earlier? Why does a game in 2018 have such shallow ideas compared to a show from the 1980s? What does David Cage smoke every morning? Who cares about Alice after the twist?
I feel like david cage is a lot like george lucas The first 3 star wars movies were his but he had a large team clean up his vision But then he basically took the full reigns for the prequels And we see what happend when he isnt cleaned up
I heard the theory that Kamski knew what he was doing, and he is a psychopath that made a secret code that gives android's sentent. And It would be cool if we would explore that more, and have more hints to that then just some animation and Kamski secret ending that doesnt say much. But was I the only one who thought that Kamski was weird? But not like cool weird, like odd weird. And remebmer bad Kamski test scene? Thi's is my revrite of this scene Kamski tell's Connor to take a gun and destroy Chloe for information. Connor stars annalising what to do, sience androids cant use guns but sience it's under human supervision and owner of Chloe is fine with this, and Connor is programed to do everything for the sake of investigation. But also he has to listen to Hank. So he has the right to choose, but then Chloe starts freaking out screaming and "crying". Her led turns red and she screams PLEASE DON"T DO THIS! Freaking players out so some of them would pull any button out of stress and if Connor shot's Chloe Kamski would be like: Negative you don't have empathy. But if you spare her, she would came back to normal end still act like robot. Kamski would then say, Fascinating, I didn't expect the newest prototype to not know the diffrence bettween codded emotions and real one. Previous models couldn't see emotions at all! I would count this as a success, but at the same time, it makes you defective Tehn Connor replise "Im not a deviant!' Then Kamski says, No do. "Defective" thats not the same as "deviant" (Maybe throw some reference to diffrence between life like and alive, from West-World) Then Kamski explainded that Connor saw Chloe's fear, and spared her, so he does have empaty for those who suffer, but he doesn't see android's emotions as any diffrent then human one. He could also say more about "Deviancy" begin a virus or mutation from the orginal code. Showing that they are emotions from comends that they system learned, it was not coded by human like the one with Chloe. He would say that he coded Chloe to copy human emotions but the didn't know how to get rid of the Valley effect, But he worked on the code that helps android learn new things and he didn't expected that it will come this far. Then at the end of the game, it will turn out that he made that code. That so called "code of soul" the RA9 virus. And in Kamski ending it would turned out that he was expecting the war to break out. And why does he do that? Cuz unlike Carl who saw humans as weak machines and belived in peacefull world with both humas and androids, Kamski just hates humans and belive's that androids are the next part in evolution. And if the rebelion of androids fall he would just consider it a faliure and come back to cyberlive to get rid of any evidance of what he did, and in fiew years, maybe he will try again.
@@ScottsGameAsylum Im still shocked, you sound great, you are funny and content is gold. Just do what you do more and you will skyrocket soon! Greetings from Croatia!
So far I've played everything but The Nomad Soul from Quantic Dream. I am forgiving when it comes to a lot of stuff, but this right here just made me fucking angry: #1 Running: A concept as old as humankind itself. Not present in Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Detroit: Become Human. I am still hoping that quantic dream will be able to release a game where you can run IN EVERY GOD DAMN LEVEL! #2: Skipping Cutscenes: Since Fahrenheit not possible. You wanna play a different ending? Have fun re-re-re-rewatching 10 minutes of cutscenes to make your decision. 5€ Visual Novels are 1,000 times ahead in this area. #3: I felt the same about the shitty plot-twist reveal that Alice was an Android and the anticlimactic part where it was revealed. #4: Todd Williams: He's an abusive junkie, ready to become violent. Because he is a junkie he spends his money not on drugs but a fucking expensive android girl... why? The Red Ice thing is mentioned on the side and you see shortly in his room that he has a picture frame of him and his real happy family and so on. He's yapping about how Androids stole his job and how ironic it is that he NEEDS an android for his household. Either you put him in a shitty derelict house that is almost falling apart with dirt everywhere in the flat or you make him self aware enough so that he says stuff like: "Blabla ironic that I need an Android but I am a lazy fuck." Something like that. #5 Hank: Like mentioned in the video Hank always looses his shit when you die. If you act more human he says you act too human. If you act more android-y he doesn't like it how cold you are. Either way you'll loose with Hank. He's always unsatisfied and pissed off about you. Hank was so extremely bitchy in my eyes. Just a couple of fixed dialogue lines would've improved his character so much! #6 Blue-balling you with rA9: All these stories around rA9. What it is or who it is. All this evidence collecting for nothing. You don't know what it is, you learn more stuff about it and at the end you still don't know jack shit. This could've been better presented so it either stays a mystery or gets completly solved. #7 Markus: All this stupid shit where he touches Androids and converts them... what's with the touching? Touching = human action. Human action = emotion. Emotion = good. Not once there is a character that gets "converted" or "awakened" that says:"I prefer to stay obdient" or "I just wanna stay out of this". We also see in the second level he purchases a painting kit wirelessly. Wouldn't it have been way cooler if he did this conversion wirelessly? You know? Like... uh the future and stuff? And wouldn't it be better if he'd suggest he explains or shows what he did? #8 Shaders: When you start the game for the very first time you have to wait until the shaders are compiled or something like that. Why is this happening when you start the game first? This is the very first time I am seeing this. I am no triple A+ game developer and I am sure as hell lacking the skill for it, but I know other games managed to integrate this part into cutscenes, tutorials, loading screens whatever. #9 The whole "we were also oppressed" thing was used in a very shitty way. It was way to forced and on the nose and didn't feel natural. I honestly don't know a solution to this, but the way it was established in Detroit was just tearjerker porn, like it was mentioned in the clip. What I liked: #1 Chloe acts and reacts here and there on how you play, how often you play and when you play. She asks you if you set her free and stuff like this from time to time. A minigame in a game so to say. #2 Flow Chart: Extremely redeeming in this game. Without flow chart I would've much faster lost interest in the storyline development. #3 Statistics: They started with this in Heavy Rain. I enjoy watching those number and statistics who did what to what percentage. Sad thing is just: Where are these numbers from? Could we have more insight? Did Quantic Dream get those stats from 10 Beta Testers in Quantic Dreams or is this still a refreshed statistic synchronizing with players worldwide? #4 Way better responsiveness on when you control a character. Sadly a lot of invisible walls everywhere though. The fear of the developers of glitching through walls in this game is EXTREME. #5 Markus on the piano: Very minor detail but you could decide how slow or fast Markus played the piece that you selected. Which is a big deal kinda. I thought I had to press 3 buttons and Markus would play at perfect Tempo. Thank you for the review. Very thorough and insightful. Thanks for putting all of this together.
Yeah the problem with this game is it’s okay to make a story about generalized themes. Robots could’ve been a good avenue however David cage fails to make the robots feel like anything but reskinned humans.Which kinda ruins the narrative they tried to tell here. Plus my god that Alice twist is absolutely terrible and makes their relationship worse.
Honestly, if you just could outright fail to leave with Alice and their story ended.... the rest of the story is mostly unaffected. Which is bad writing.
It’s been 2 years, but I’d be very interested in seeing you tackle Omikron, since not a whole lot of people have talked about it, though if you’re sick of David Cage as a whole, I get it.
Cage actually properly foreshadows something in this game. Yes, his trademark telegraphing is throughout with everything, and I can't even tell the actual foreshadowing was intentional, or just give evil corp evil things to do accidentally congealing into it when combined with a gameplay element. It's more evident when Connor goes deviant and survives after that, while both Marcus and North die in the protest/revolution- it recontextualizes the "Software Instability" mechanic, as well as interactions with the corp AI, and Shamski. Yes, it's a cheap play at global domination motivation, plus the whole "all outcomes benefit the corp" BS. Out of the sea of telegraphing, he got one thing right.
Really this is the best of this guy, which at the same time doesn't mean anything, because it's still bad and his choices are going to make some bad characters. But even though Connor and Hanks are cringe, they are good characters, even if there was no narrative from the other two points of view, only from these two with the other two stories being the investigation, but he doesn't hold back and shoots to three sides being for me one of them the only good one, and it doesn't make sense for humans to be all horrible the humans of this world don't work and their reactions are too cyberpunk for this society to be like ours only with robotic slaves that that are broken like a twig, the economy should have gone into space.
Would you ever considering reviewing deadly premonition 2 Only if you’ve already played it, I care too much for my fellow man to tell anyone to play it who hasn’t already played it
Yeah Alice's twist is dumb and makes their dynamic that much less interesting but i don't think it's the rnd of the world, i still love their corner of the story regardless
I have seen some people defend the twist by saying it is supposed to test players if they see Alice as a person regardless if she is an android or human which is fine and good, but the execution makes it fall flat for number of reasons. One is that Kara, withput the player input decides to be denial about revelation. You have no option to seek the truth because the game doesn't allow you to because Kara doesn't want it. Two, it kinda makes previous scenes of trying to find shelter and food for Alice kinda redundant now, does it? Three, it feels like twist for the sake of twist, it doesn't really change much in grand scheme of things. Now this is more personal, but Alice is terribly written character. I understand that she may be traumatized kid, but that's literally all there is to her. She is just plot device for Kara to someone to care for.
It's a common issue found in all David Cage games, dude always fail to delivery the message. Gameplay is boring too, it's the same glorified QTEs over and over.
I'm gonna be honest, while I do agree with you, I still very much so enjoyed playing this game, and to me the bottom line of a game is to be fun, which this game succeeds at.
Cage using the BLM/Black Power fist gave me pause but what really made me uncomfortable was the framing of Markus's story and how in the game the only way to get the "good" ending is to be choose peace no matter what, even if that means letting your oppressors murder you where you stand. pretty much all social movements have ongoing conversations about non-violent action versus "diversity of tactics" as well as what constitutes violence in specific situations (self defense, property destruction, etc.) but when Cage clumsily tries to engage with this conversation he does so without even an ounce of the nuance it requires ludologically, Cage and the game are saying if androids (and therefore any community they may represent) want to be allowed to just exist, much less have anything resembling rights, they need to endure any and all violent abuse hurled their way even if it costs them their lives. the idea is that they need to be "better" than their oppressors, but in practice it plays out more like this: the only way to earn your humanity is to meet some nebulous standard of acceptability as determined by the very people who want to deny you your humanity in the first place. unless you are an unassailable paragon of goodness you forfeit any claim to your own humanity and any rights that it would entail. unless you go about asking for your humanity in a manner approved by the very people withholding it you will be summarily denied and you will have deserved whatever treatment you received this is not to say that picking up a gun and shooting back is necessarily the right answer either, because that's the thing, it's not a black and white issue where one way is inherently better and more morally correct than the other at all times in every situation. rather, the reason I find this troubling is because it perpetuates an ongoing problem of communities having to behave a certain way for anything they say or do to be considered "valid." and what's sad is I think there could be a really interesting conversation about this very subject and a game where choices, by the necessity of requiring a button prompt, must be binary or at least multiple choice could be a fantastic medium to explore that and look at what happens when you abide by such a philosophy. the opportunity to make a profound statement about humanity and our choices and hold up a mirror to our behaviors is right there and Cage utterly squanders it. he had the chance to say so much but in the end he didn't say much of anything at all
David Cage games. Superficial fluff full of faux substance. Here he tried to explore racism, but all he managed to make his characters yell is "I am alive/They are alive". Looking back that scene where they started to sing was just very off. Androids sang and everybody else was like "Hey wait a second, let's watch this shit. Yeah, they can sing, so I guess they deserve to live independently", that is in the same game which had androids ride in the back of the bus...like...what am I supposed to say about that? I guess our black ancestors just had to sing to be free, and the white people would be like "Oh, you precious little n****r, you sang so well, so you deserve your freedom". This very much downplays everything about the racism, it is not so simple to resolve, we still fight with racism to this day
I’m pretty sure David Cage is going for “androids are just like humans” Androids singing shows that they listen to music and can enjoy culture like humans do.
My guess as to why the themes in this game are performative? Because Quantic Dream are a company. A big company with investors. If they stood for anything, especially in a time when racial inequality was a hot button topic, they'd risk fracturing their audience, even more than they might've already did with this game, which might've affected the profit off this game. They can claim plausible deniability if people claim the game stands for something. It's the type of game that stands for nothing, but people who enjoy it can still claim it has 'powerful themes'. That's not to say Cage is exempt. Looking at all of his games, he very much strikes me as someone who has passion, but lacks restraint or focus. He wants to be the video game equivalent of Terrence Malick, but he's actually Ed Wood.
I wish David cage would study some actual leftist and social movements instead of just using symbols he doesn't have any knowledge about. I may be a bit biased since I'm a socialist, but if he at least studied some socialism and Marxism (as controversial the name "Marxism" has become because of the soviet union) the game could be a great critique of capitalism (or how AI would function under capitalism)
I remember seeing the comparion of black slavey to droid slavey in the game (using the wise black woman trope). And I lost it. The way they write poc just kills me. Luther is the best one so far, but he's just a blank slate. It's terrible that I care about him more than Kara. The best story hy far was conner's story. The worst is Kara
Even then, Luther is also a walking stereotype. The gentle black giant? Quiet scary black guy? The fact that his name is fucking Luther while the black woman's name is fucking Rose. And Cage says it's not political. The audacity 😅
@@mysouptoocold1656 I wouldn’t mind it if he at least owned up to it. He likes washing his hands about it but everyone can see right through him. It's just embarrassing.
And in the case of the Androids... it's just not comparable to POC and Jewish slavery/persecution. Because the androids WERE built to be slaves. Slaves is not even the right term because you don't say your RUMBA hoover is a slave. A RUMBA doesn't steal your job or make you replaceable in the capitalist system.
never liked the game i remember i had a friend who was mad at me and called me stupid and an idiot and know nothing about gaming . i remember not being able to play it as young . soo when I watched jacksepticeye playthrough it hit me when the 2 lesbian prostitutes kissed , it made zero fucking sense because these 2 loose their memories every hour , becoming deviant doesn't mean ability not to loose ones memories , does that mean they fall in love everytime they loose ? as I remember it wasn't explained idk if I missed it tho
I guess it's implied they don't get mind wiped similar to how their trackers stop working but I never thought about it. It's not a true good explanation but I think it works
33:50 that's exactly how I feel about this game. I liked it a lot when it came out but as I got older and looked back on it it just seems hollow and poorly written
I used to love Beyond Two Souls until this came out and then I loved the shit out of this one, until now just realising there's so much wrong with it the androids hate humans, but become them. So in a few years time humans stop attacking humans because androids, humans qttack animals, humans and whatever they want its human stupidity, but yeah that all changes. I'm sick of the real life references in this game. Alice I hate, hate, hate. But yeah I really hate it, it sucks bit I still like it somewhat. Just wondering when we'll get a great game.
Detroit was a good game for what it was at the time it came out. There's a lot of revisionist history from most people on this thread. I platinum Detroit & Heavy Rain. Next, I'll do Beyond 2 Souls just because that'll be the last in the trilogy for Quantic Dream for me
I absolutely love the idea of a COD player saying they don’t like politics especially in their entertainment as they play literal American military funded propaganda
This is the only David Cage review of yours I don't agree with. I loved every second, didn't feel suffocated at all by the amount of content etc. The only thing I find dumb was the Alice twist
Seems like you don't understand this game a little. Just to let you know: Alice & Kara's visit to Zlatko's place has so many reasons and impact the rest of the story. 1. A & K have met Luther, who broke to become deviant triggered upon Alice's attachment to Kara and became their guardian because of it. 2. It was a learning curve for Kara where she has learnt, she can't be so naive, hapless and she can't trust everyone 3. They went to Zlatko's place as a result of being desperate for seeking help & shelter 4. This whole part showed the cruelty of some people and the fact that broken androids wanted their revenge
@@ScottsGameAsylum I'd read it, it actually makes good points. I will say your points about that section I mostly agree with tho, My first time playing it it was super tense
I feel everyone is always criticizing David Cage, while in the end they are doing some of the best adventure games out there and at least TRYING to make an interesting story and game, with all the terrible games coming out today without any story. Yes is not perfect but i m so tired of listening to these stuff when then everyone enjoys playing his games so. Come on.
TBH story telling point and click games just aren't really good cause video games stories are usually pretty bad. I can name off like maybe 5 that I actually enjoyed, only good point and click story game I genuinely enjoyed whole way through was until dawn and that took almost 6 years to make
Until Dawn is not a point'n click game, It's a interactive movie, I'm sorry. FullThrottle, Monkey Island Series, The Longest Journey, Blade Runner, The Last Express, Grim Fandango, Gemini Rue, Syberia 1 and 2, those are REAL point'n click games. Those games are all about slow pacing and puzzle resolving, and not interactive movies with glorified QTEs, not even close.
That Alice twist is almost as dumb as the killer being one of the player characters in Heavy Rain. It's one of those twists that a writer has because they think stories needs twists
Yeah exactly and the reveal is so lazy
Honestly, I think this plot twist was going to be a commentary on the very real moral grey area that is P. Doe Files purchasing childlike "real dolls" for the purposes of... well, you know. This is the only way for the twist to work, as Kara could have chosen to forget Alice was an android because if she was human, she would have a chance to grow up and escape the Phil Spector-esque father. Knowing David Cage's work history, I'm almost positive this was the intended storyline and why Kara's plot seems like such an afterthought. I would put money on David Cage being talked out of this subplot by Adam Williams, knowing that there would be no way Cage would be capable of handling such dark subject matter without... you know... being himself. I'm also assuming that such a storyline might be the bridge too far for most countries and result in the game being banned. Australia actually banned... "Alice Dolls" in 2019, a year after this game came out. OH, Alice in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carol, suddenly makes a much more sensical metaphor now, huh?
The Heavy Rain twist did work…
Because nobody saw it coming and couldn’t even see it coming wtf david cage
@@coachacola3755 We were in the mind of the perpetrator while he was trying to hide proofs, and somehow his thought did not reveal this. Was he so paranoid that he feared a telepath listening? It didn't seem to be a sci-fi/fantasy story...
David could have just kept Alice as a human child could have been great for Kara's story
I really do hate the android child twist. That path of the story with those characters, up to that point, had been about an android "mother" figure and a child relying on eachother and becoming a family as they try to escape and make a new life somewhere else. Not exactly the most original thing, but it was still fairly nice. You could get behind it emotionally. And then the twist happens. Now it's a child-android programmed to be a child being a child, and a caretaker-android programmed to be a caretaker being a caretaker. There is no character growth, no emotional resonance, they're just a pair of robots that haven't left their predesignated roles in the slightest.
It just completely ruins that part of the story, made it so that I couldn't take anything to do with those characters seriously anymore.
I laughed so hard I had to lie down for two hours
I hated the fact that they purposely blur the twist (magazine ) in the beginning of the game. That's not how you do it people! That's how you get shitty twists in stories
as much as a trash fire as Spielberg's AI; artificial intelligence was it still had a far better and nuanced take on the whole child robot thing.
Glad I'm not the only one who thought so.
I’m so late to this game, but the clenched fist or Black Power Fist has been a thing in black activist spaces since the 60’s. Like it very much predates the BLM movement, which just makes it even more wild that DC chose to use that symbol like wow bro
It has been a symbol much longer, and been used all around the world. The black activists didn't invent it in the 60s, they used an already recognised symbol of fighting against oppression.
@@Jack.OffermanBut it’s clearly an analogy to the civil rights nonevent, happening in DETROIT, standing people in the back of the bus. I mean, it’s really obvious.
Despite my rage
I am still in David's cage.
What's your age?
That question is strange
but, I’m in my teenage….range.
Despiteee all my rage!!
I am still just a rat in his cage!!!!
One thing I never understood about Alice being an android twist is: Is Alice a machine or a deviant?
She always listens to Kara's orders.
Stimmt, die Frage habe ich mir auch immer gestellt.
Well she can shoot Todd in one of the routes but I mean she doesn’t seem aware like Kara does and androids are supposed to have amazing intelligence. After all the abuse it’s hard to think she hasn’t deviated. 1:47
yeah she also never really acknowledges being an android? as in obviously she never mentions it before the reveal but even afterwards there’s zero discussion about it with her
@@pickledidiot4569 there is a hint at Rose's house, if you let Alice see the dead Android and then talk to her after
@@M_IAWIA correct. And if you insist on talking to her, she says that if she tells you then "you wouldn't love me anymore". It`s easy to miss. I found this dialogue on the fifth playthrough
Robots took my job I'm poor! Somehow can buy a housekeeper robot and a robot that's the spitting image of his kid so he can abuse them.
There's one fan theory I've heard that I think could've resulted in a more emotionally satisfying ending. It states that Elijah Kamski (the founder of Cyberlife) was the one who created deviants and that he wanted the revolution to occur. There's even confirmation that Markus was gifted to Carl Manfred by Kamski. Not only does this sort of answer the big question to Connor's mystery, but it could also add to a crisis for the androids. Do they legitimately have emotions, or was it all just programmed by Kamski. I once imagined a scene in which Markus confronts Kamski, asking questions to his creator.
Ich glaube es macht Sinn, hätte Kamski die Deviants programmiert, um ein Ass im Ärmel zu haben, sollte er aus CyberLife herausgewoefen werden. So kam es auch und Kamsky konnte wieder in eine ranghohe Position aufrücken. Falls es nicht klappt, hätte er CyberLife aus Rache geschadet.
Yeah this is my favorite theory and how I interpret the game myself
I heard about that theory. Did you realise that while androids break out of they're programs we can see random numbers and sometimes there is one that repeats, its RA9. And I one of the promo videos, Kamski 2028, kamski talks about androids begin able to learn. And when journalist asks him if hes not afraid that those androids will rebel, and he mas like: Nah there is no way! Thats just silly. :) Yeahhh... definitly. I think he added the RA9 as the code of soul. And It would be nice to find out in one of the endings, that all androids are concious but they are all in sort of "Asleep mode" That's why they can fell stress. I always wondered why they system gats dissable. It seems to not help them deal with they roles. It's more like, make's them more human like, but weaker at the same time.
They confirm it in some endings, Elijah created deviancy and Markus to become ra9 so that an android revolution would arise, and he would come up with a patch to fix it which reinstates him as CEO of CyberLife. If the revolution fails and the androids explode Detroit, his house is basically a bunker far from it all. He wins either way
@@beetothebop123 I remember that, but there’s also an ending where it’s basically revealed that Cyberlife engineered the revolution for pretty much no reason.
They do have a "kill switch", in the first chapter we learn that each android has a deactivation code but it doesn't work on deviants (how convenient).
Was rather nice spending the evening watching this, if only cause it made me feel kinda validated in how much this game really conflicted with me.
I went in having pretty low expectations, but I'm still a sucker for cyberpunk vibes. Was surprised by how much I enjoyed the scenes of Connor and Hank especially (like if their whole shtick was the entire game, it would have been a great campy bit of fun), but... I won't go into details, but being a victim of domestic abuse myself, Kara's story was so disturbing, especially getting one of her bad endings. It screwed me up so bad and had me in a disassociative state for a whole week before I just had an emotional breakdown and was sobbing for a whole night, not because I felt like "wow, what an emotionally moving story" but because "this game has taken me back to an extremely dark place in my life that I thought no longer haunted me".
But at the same time, the game did something that was incredible, particularly to me as a musician. For the soundtrack, each character had their own composer handling their music. While that in and of itself is really cool, where that shined especially was how that was integrated in set pieces where the different characters would meet. My fave example being one where Kara is on the run from the cops and gets tracked down by Connor and Hank. The music playing in that scene is a collaborative composition between those character's composers that works in elements and lemotifs from Connor and Kara's themes, It's nothing short of incredible in how much it heightens the tension and drama of that scene and is something I've yet to be seen done in any other game. And it's so frustrating how such a compelling idea is in a game that doesn't feel like it deserves it at all.
But I digress. I don't regret playing the game as it added to how to think about stories in games on the with both in what's compelling and what's horrifying, but damn is it rough trying to find a mental balance when you find a game awful but also love aspects in it.
I can vibe with that and the OST deserves its own lengthy deep dive in its own right. Detroit is easily the most palatable of QD's games and it tries to build a world that feels lived in.
Why...dose that single man.. have a robot child?
Why are they building robot children?
Why, if these robots are domestic servents, did they make them filly human and not the far far FAR cheaper roomba with arms?
So many questions.. too many stupid answers 🤣🤣
I feel like David Cage has some interesting ideas that could be done well. But I think he takes what is a solid foundation and then as puts pen to paper (or after several drinks) he has a lot of "oh what if" ideas and then tries to cram them all together and then we get a mixed product in the end. But to be fair I do see the potential in each of his games.
That is the most frustrating thing for me too. There are some great games here that are buried under so much crap.
Writers like David Cage need someone they trust and respect who can tell them what works and doesn't, and what to cut.
A situation auteurs rarely land in due to ego.
The next time I play this game, I'm going to have Kara obey Todd - resulting in both her and Alice's death, Marcus being an absolute failure at being a leader (he was a caretaker, for pity's sake - not a leader!) and do my best to keep Connor and Hank on good terms (not sure how Kara/Alice's absence and Marcus' ineptitude will affect the Hank/Connor storyline).
Well, him getting the android daughter could have had a potential to be explained in a way, where he bought her so that he could feel less alone but also owning a punching bag who he could unleash his wrath upon. He hates androids so him getting an android child to abuse could have been a thing in there, it would make sense.
But that option died when he caught Kara and accused her of "stealing his little girl", which resulted in the nonsense which was described in this video. Where he hates androids, because they stole his job, he is angry that he had to get Kara as a house cleaner (the irony of his job being stolen by an android and buying an android to do work at his house), but also buying an android child to take care of
It's so funny at the end when Luther is almost like, trying to tell Kara that it's okay if Alice is an android...she's still her daughter - like?? Kara is ALSO an android. Also, can androids NOT tell when someone else is an android? How is Todd[?] so broke but still wasting money on buying and repairing androids to beat up? Why does he behave as if Alice actually is a little girl but treats Kara like she's just a machine? It's a twist that brings up so many more questions than answers and also doesn't matter - what a weird writing decision.
I wonder how the game would have changed if Kara's storyline began with Alice coming home from being repaired. Like, if we knew Alice was a robot from the beginning. Or even if the roles were switched and Kara was a human housekeeper for Todd yet took Alice and ran anyway because she couldn't stand seeing Todd hurt her.
@@buzzinbea The more you think about it the more wrong there is found with it, isn't it?
Like...we could possibly explain Alice reveal as a denial, but I would say it goes straight out the window since Kara found the magazine before she went deviant.
Also has Alice always been deviant? She didn't act like a robot since the beginning.
Since she is a robot, she should know her own functions therefore also just turn off her temperature sensors or something when she was cold af. Like...they surely come with instructions, but they have all sorts of info downloaded into them, and don't tell me that there wasn't space for that in the child model.
If you find more stuff wrong I didn't notice... let's dig that shit out
clearly he doesnt believe androids are human so why did he decide to buy one for thousands of dollars just to beat it up. so weird
@Sunny-ek8sx right? He should have just bought a punch-bag 😂
@@ScottsGameAsylum I guess he likes moving targets
Connor: Where is Jericho?
Android: I WILL NEVER TELL YOU!
Connor: What if I use a voice changer?
Android: Then this changes everything, this way..
Did anyone noticed David Cages fetish of a short-haired girl being attacked.
Because he has one of those segments in every one of his games.
There's nothing like watching someone take a good dump on David Cage. Thanks for delivering.
Ja, was für ein Alleinstellungsmerkmal gäähn..^^ aber, ja, ist lustig.
what frustrates me most about the alice twist is that the story structure SHOULD be so obvious! with the three main characters, we have connor on the human side and then markus on the android side, so it fits thematically to have kara and alice being a midpoint between the two; proving that despite all the conflict androids and humans CAN coexist. it’s not exactly complex or original but it works, whereas having alice turn out to be an android is like??? what’s the message?? that androids can love each other? we already know that from other moments in the game. if it’s supposed to pose some philosophical question of ‘could you still love an android child’ then that’s unbelievably stupid because we literally play as three androids and we’re very obviously supposed to be feeling sympathetic for them. the whole twist is just cage shooting himself in the foot for the sake of a ‘gotcha’ moment for the players
I described this game to my friends as "a story about oppression made by people who have never actually experienced oppression"
I kept cringing playing this game. It felt racist because I don't believe the game convinced me that andriods are people. Plus the Holocaust references? yeeesh
i hate that the "alice is actually an android" twist makes karas sacrifices practically worthless/done for nothing, like what u chose has no impact on the story despite it being a game where ur choices are supposed to matter
People are you crazy? Does twist MAKE the sacrafice worthless? I feel like nobody ever thought about the meaning of Karas storyline. Do you want to say, what if Alice was a human, Kara would not be like the kidnapper? All she needed to do was to take human Alice from Tod (he is possibly dead after that) and give Alice to the police or something. Kara forces Alice to sleep in the old car at rain, sleep in the old house with the maniac (she does it 3 TIMES IN A ROW) or to witness an armed robbery (i think it is quite traumatic for the child). Kara is so desperate, that she is like literally ready to kill Alice by runnig on the highway, only to not get caught by the police. Doesn't human Alice has mom? Doesn't USA has some kind of orphan houses? It is Kara who is going to be destroed, not Alice. Kara do that only for herself, it was no love in it, more like ownership. In fact the twist is literally the only thing that makes her story not so worthless (and not so creepy. Imagine if Tod and Kara switched the genders).
David Cage is the king of wasted potential.
And wasting my brain cells
My biggest issue with Detroit Become Human is how I can't see the androids as sentient. To me they don't show enough truly sentient characteristics for me to view them as anything more than soulless robots.
I will never see an Ai in the real world as being sentient. I just don't think it is at all possible. But I can set that aside with some suspension of disbelief if it makes a story better. But I just can't do it for DBH because the robots are just... Bad. They're not interesting characters. They literally feel like Ai that have read a few textbooks on revolutions, or parenting, or police investigations and just replicated it like ChatGPT.
Marcus's story was slightly ok, the scene of him crying as Painter Guy (don't remember his name, he wasn't interesting) was fairly humanizing. But outside of that he's just the most generic revolutionary I can think of. A single good scene paired with a hundred other mediocre ones just makes you forget the good scene. It's made even worse when during the news broadcast he turns off his skin, revealing his metal/plastic body. I'm supposed to be seeing this machine as on the same conscious level as human and you're removing the most humanizing element of its appearance?????
Kara's story made my eyes glaze over by the sheer boredom of it all. I don't like to use the word boring to describe a story, but it's really the only word that properly expresses my disdain for this plotline. Kara's story is just so, so boring. I do not care for Kara, I would gladly cave in Alice's head with a claw hammer, I can't even remember the name of any other characters in it. Nevermind the fact that the twist of Alice being an android completely ruins the entire theme of the storyline.
Connor's story was goin' good, it was goin' great. It was near the end of the game I started to think "Connor might actually be sentient, he truly has free will. He's not some deviant, he's a real pers- ok what the fuck was that twist?" For some reason right at the end of Connor's campaign it's revealed that he was created specifically to be deviant so that they could study deviants better. So he's not sentient. He just has less rules to follow than the other soulless robots. They just went into his code and deleted a few lines saying he can't hold a gun or talk back.
So this story that has the primary theme of "Robots can be sentient" fails to show any sentient robots.
The issues you brought up here, I had the same sentiment. Kara's story was interesting at first but realizing after a while that her story hardly intertwines with Connor's or Markus', I got bored with hers, and it didn't help that Alice ended up being just another android. If the game was just gonna force Kara to be a robot mom on the run with her kid, then she was better off just being a minor character that Connor has to deal with, not a playable character.
And anytime Markus' story came up, it felt more and more like an annoyingly long cinematic that you can't skip. And he becomes Robo-Jesus for the dumbest reason possible: going out for supplies is somehow such a grand idea that no other android could possibly think of! He's a borderline Gary Stu and the ability that he has to just switch androids from machine to "deviant" goes against the "become human" aspect and could easily make him more like a villain than a savior. (Imo he's more interesting as an android devil than RoboJesus)
It's been said TO DEATH but Connor's story is the best out of the three, he actually comes closet to embodying the "become human" theme of the game and actually goes through events that force him to think about his own sentience and purpose, not to mention he comes across as more an Ra9 type than Markus, he's the one that truly frees all the Cyberlife androids if you play him as a deviant - not Markus. Connor is the one who finds the sculpture (also a Jericho clue) at the Ortiz crime scene, and it is HIM who is confronted with the "human or machine" question by Kamski. For some reason, Connor was given the majority of the narratively important scenes that ask the BIG question, not successfully mind you, but still.
I feel like a perfect microcosm of David Cage's mentality on making games is actually in the gameplay. He seems to recognize that he's actually making movies and not games for like 90% of their runtime so he's like "Fuck we need to have the player do something" so he just has the player push buttons pointlessly in order to keep the story going the way he wants it to. Rarely do you get a chance to actually provide an input that actually changes things, but if you actually cut out all the pointless QTEs that just stop the game from pausing itself every 10 seconds, you would have a "game" that is a series of 30+ minute long cutscenes where the player then makes a single choice at the end to determine what cutscene to play next. \
It just shows that he has no comprehension for how to actually make a game or let the player actually make their own story, because he's too wrapped up in wanting to tell his own story, despite him constantly posturing on about how he wants players to make their own stories. But he cannot see past himself, so we end up being forced to play a role in his stories where logic and basic common sense goes out the window, just hitting buttons to move onto the next cutscene.
Meanwhile I've had more narratively engaging stories created through gameplay playing games like Civilization than I have with anything in Cage's catalogue.
33:28 That's funny, because games have been a mature way of telling stories even as far back as the late 90s/early 2000s. Games like KOTOR 1 and 2, Metal Gear Solid 1-4, Starcraft 1 and Brood War, Warcraft 3 and Frozen Throne, Mass Effect 1-3, Elder Scrolls 4 and 5, among others, have gripping, mature storylines that can give any major movie a run for its money. I'd say that the gaming medium has evolved past the movies, because they can tell stories in a way that movies or books can't.
@@zzodysseuszz No it doesn't. It's way better than Morrowind ever was.
great video! if i had to chime in, what really pissed me off in the story was how alice was revealed to be an android. establishing a child-android dynamic where kara actually had developed a sense of responsibility for who she thought was a human child would have eventually proven that humans and androids COULD co-exist with one another. giving the story the twist that alice was an android completely abolished that belief because now we know that they're not actually even deviating from their roles; kara takes care of alice because that's what she was meant to do; take care of children and be a nanny. alice was attached to kara because that's what she is meant to do; she is a child who attaches to anyone who takes care of her.
to be honest, that plot twist ruined the entire kara storyline for me because coming in with the idea that alice was a human gave us a reason to protect and care for her, but also to stay alive in general to be able to do those things; now that we know that she's actually a machine----she's replaceable, not an actual human being, and ruins the plot.
A game that offers you the freedom to choose your story where the developers lecture you on why their story is the correct.
No QuanticDream, I DON'T think robots are living beings let alone people and no I DON'T think they deserve to be anything other than servants for humanity as they were designed to be.
Thank you for reviewing the entire David Cage Saga
No, thank you for watching the existential nightmare lol
12:36 It's actually funny, because the only reason for these stories to take place side by side is because the choices in one could affect the other, but the paths are predetermined in many instances. Only the Kara path seems to rely on other paths' choices. It would make sense for instance, that Hank would try to convince Connor to join the Deviants if they're peaceful, but it would also make sense that Hank and Captain Allen would support Connor putting North/Markus down with a sniper rifle if the Deviant Androids are violent upstarts. But that's not the case. It doesn't matter if Markus goes full Ghandhi or Che Guevara, a ''good'' Connor will join him against the humans, because Hank will turn on you if you remain loyal to humanity, even if the android revolutionaries are violent upstarts, and Hank will support Connor activating the androids, even if it's to support a violent, anti-human revolution.
The way things are, it would make more sense if they adopted the Sonic Adventure 2/Sonic '06 route of making each character's story its own thing, and you have to finish it the whole way through before playing the other characters' storylines. Like how you can play through the Dark path in SA2 before you choose the Light path. They should've done that for this game. Have the Connor story path, then have the Kara path, then the Markus path, each as separate parts of the story that you can play the whole way through.
The problem with this idea is that people would only ever play through the Hank and Connor story because it's the only good part of the game.
@@nathanniesche6380 Then they should've just focused on that and made the Markus and Kara levels into smaller bonus levels.
No, that is too simple for David.
@@Leonard_Wolf_2056 I suppose it is.
29:23 HOLY CRAP IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR THE NAME OF THIS FOR FOREVER THANK YOU
I've been loving this channel man. Good work. Your delivery is spot on!
Hey thanks!
The manufacturer in this story really did master the infuriating trait of a child saying “I’m not hungry” after you busting ass to get them something to eat.
Detroit has some great moments, and _some_ great characters... wrapped up in a story that is at its core exceptionally dumb and requires so many leaps of logic to make work that it is a shame Connor was wasted on this game.
David Cage reminds me a lot of Steven Moffat. Brilliant ideas, but if you put him in charge without anyone reigning him in, everything he does becomes a tangled mess.
It seems the Quantic Dream journey is not over now that we know that Star Wars Eclipse is coming up in the future... I couldn't help but laugh when I saw the trailer ends and there was Quantic Dream logo showing up,.
Other than that, great job on the reviews as always!
War, war never changes... At least it's going to be about 5 years before we see how they "ruin" the franchise.
Because we all know that SW is a bastion for exquisite storytelling. Yes that previous line is sarcasm.
@@ScottsGameAsylumThere's a lot of great SW stories, but I don't expect anything new to be great. Most of the good stuff happened in the early 2000s.
Watched this video after finishing Detroit, and found myself agreeing with a lot of what you said. I wanted to say thanks for putting together that list of games that handle mature topics. I just finished Detention and really enjoyed it, and am about to boot up Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Night In The Woods is also on my list. Very much appreciate those recommendations!
What I hate the most about Detroit is that it doesn't understand it's own motifs. I get it that Cage just needed some kind of opressed group in his story so he has characters to put in some miserable situations. I actually belive that it could have worked if he put some thought into what it means to be android or human. At one point Connor says that androids don't have feelings, they just simulate them So it could be the case that humans neglect obvious situations when robots get attached to children they care for, or when they create art. There could be a talk show where some corporate experts argue against some niche android rights movement. In fact this is a direction where the opening scene leads us, android got attached to the girl, fears to be replaced and snaps when it happens.
But this whole concept is just thrown off the window because Cage needs to have his "gaining freedom" moment and more important, this stuuupid conversions on the spot, performed by Markus. And this breaks the entire concept of becoming human because humanity is just a flip of a switch in this game. Why should anyone in this world care about those beings rights, when they always act like machines and just go on killing spree from time to time. Their memories can be erased and memories transmitted to another body. There are entire series of androids that not only look the same but are meant for the same task (Cara is a standard house cleaner). There are robots adapted to work in extreme temperatures and for gods sake, children can have their cold sensors turned off. They are clearly different than humans. But those topics become only a plot device and game just wants us to assume, that android are human because they cry, care for other beings and don't like being beaten. I guess that David Cage belives that humans and pets are exactly the same.
How this game dares to ask questions like "decide if you are a human or a machine" and then show that you gain humanity by
a) getting it transmitted to you, or
b) being beaten and abused?
This becomes even more absurd after the scene with Kamski. General concept would be ok if being human aspect was nuanced, see if a robot amakes a cruel but pragmatic decision. It feels dramatic because Connor can shoot a helpless android girl in the face. But think about it, why should he think she is more than a machine? She is one of the identical androids in the house, just mindlesly walks and kneels, being completely indifferent being held on the gunpoint. Even if there is a process of becoming more than a machine, there is no reason to think she is on that path. If she panicked, or showed any emotion, it would make sense but It falls apart because the game makes you assume that always android==human. At the same time it contradicts itself, suggesting that androids "become" humans.
I don't expect Cage to write a philosophical piece with profound discussion about what it means to be human. Story about robots doesn't need to be one, in order to be consistent and fun. But this game just can't make up its mind about it's own rules. Instead it just mindlessly chews on complicated topics, using them as a mere estetic and an excuse to put characters in difficult, emotional situations. This applies both for s-f and opression themes.
And it frustrates me so much because almost any deeper thought that i heard about this game, comes not from it's execution or writing but from topics that it's based on. When someone says that Detroit provoked them to think about being human, or media manipulation, or what is art, or will machines take our jobs or whatever, remember that it's just because game threw that topic in their face. It never discusses any of that on any meaningful level.
The funny thing is: our brain also just simulates feelings. And exactly that is where it becomes hard to differentiate between human and deviant.
Dude your videos on the Cage games are epic. So entertaining and straight realtalk, love it
this channel should be renamed to David Cage Personal Hater
Nah, imagine the SEO nightmare!
And I don't hate DC, I hate his writing
The one thing that I've wondered is how Detroit: Become Human could've been better. In my opinion, all stories have the potential to be good, even bad ones. As an aspiring writer and filmmaker, a tactic I have used is taking a failed story that had a decent premise and making it reach its potential. However, the games of David Cage feel so bad that they seem impossible to fix. What would you do to improve his games (specifically the plot and characters)?
watch my review of heavy rain. it has all the speculative fan fiction for ya
@@ScottsGameAsylum I’ll try checking that out. On a related note, how would you personally fix the blackout plot hole in Heavy Rain?
The one bit of criticism that I do have with this video is that it's implied that Kamski wanted the androids he created to deviate. That's why he didn't create a separate "kill switch", as you called it, to shut them down if they go against their programming.
If you watched the video, the context behind that comment is part of a landslide of ideas that could have been part of the story. And the dark age of Camelot punchline should inform that this was sarcasm
@@ScottsGameAsylum, oh, okay. The video is super long so I didn't watch it all. 😁
Only just found this series, good stuff. Got yourself a subscribe!
David cage is a genius at creating immersion and atmosphere but needs to spend more time on his writing, regardless I’ve always enjoyed his games and they are very entertaining despite their flaws and I look forward to his next game.
I see you found the copy/past shortcuts
You know now Scott says it DBH does seem similar to Almost Human
Right. While i said in the vid that i got bored after episode 4. I have now watched the entire show and it might as well be a licenced game
Finally watched the video and it was another great one, Scott :).
David cage is proof you cant substitute fanfics for game writing lol
David Cajee hid key components in the game to "trick you"- AGAIN. It would be better if the player was given the opportunity to find the magazine on their own, maybe shoved in the trash? Tricking the player tends to make us feel..... Hmmmmm what's the word... Non Immersive
Great Video, just like the other ones.
Especially the Part where my Comment was flashed on screen, I'm quite flattered 😄
Your comment is what sparked that part of the script. So thank you for giving me a fresh perspective!
@@ScottsGameAsylum Honestly, I was quite shocked by your Videos, because I've never seen Anyone talk badly about any of those Games.
Granted, I was basically a child when I played Heavy Rain & Beyond, but all the German TH-camrs I watched at the time had nothing but good things to say about these Titles.
As for Detroit, the 'Plot Twist' with Alice being a Robot was really the only thing I thought was kinda off, the other Highlighted Issues didn't really bother me.
The abrupt change of Pace in-between different scenes for example, there was probably only one point in the Game where I was surprised by the scene ending.
Detroit is the best game of the bunch for sure. I genuinely enjoyed my time the first couple of playthroughs. Sadly thats when the cracks start to appear.
@@TheZedrem I'm guessing the German translation added a lot to the stupid story. Wouldn't have fixed the plot, but if you get talented enough writers on the job and you can really polish up a turd.
finally a new upload!
great one, mate. if androids didn't have power, they'd be statues.
How does this game have worse animations than a game that came out five years earlier?
Why does a game in 2018 have such shallow ideas compared to a show from the 1980s?
What does David Cage smoke every morning?
Who cares about Alice after the twist?
I feel like david cage is a lot like george lucas
The first 3 star wars movies were his but he had a large team clean up his vision
But then he basically took the full reigns for the prequels
And we see what happend when he isnt cleaned up
Bro please do a video on the first season of taletells the walking dead, it’s right up your alley
Funny you say that I was thinking about that game last night. I've only played the first episode when it came out
@@ScottsGameAsylum same here but I replayed it fully a few years back and it’s definitely worth the hype
I heard the theory that Kamski knew what he was doing, and he is a psychopath that made a secret code that gives android's sentent. And It would be cool if we would explore that more, and have more hints to that then just some animation and Kamski secret ending that doesnt say much. But was I the only one who thought that Kamski was weird? But not like cool weird, like odd weird. And remebmer bad Kamski test scene? Thi's is my revrite of this scene
Kamski tell's Connor to take a gun and destroy Chloe for information. Connor stars annalising what to do, sience androids cant use guns but sience it's under human supervision and owner of Chloe is fine with this, and Connor is programed to do everything for the sake of investigation. But also he has to listen to Hank. So he has the right to choose, but then Chloe starts freaking out screaming and "crying". Her led turns red and she screams PLEASE DON"T DO THIS! Freaking players out so some of them would pull any button out of stress and if Connor shot's Chloe Kamski would be like: Negative you don't have empathy. But if you spare her, she would came back to normal end still act like robot. Kamski would then say, Fascinating, I didn't expect the newest prototype to not know the diffrence bettween codded emotions and real one. Previous models couldn't see emotions at all! I would count this as a success, but at the same time, it makes you defective
Tehn Connor replise "Im not a deviant!'
Then Kamski says, No do. "Defective" thats not the same as "deviant" (Maybe throw some reference to diffrence between life like and alive, from West-World) Then Kamski explainded that Connor saw Chloe's fear, and spared her, so he does have empaty for those who suffer, but he doesn't see android's emotions as any diffrent then human one. He could also say more about "Deviancy" begin a virus or mutation from the orginal code. Showing that they are emotions from comends that they system learned, it was not coded by human like the one with Chloe. He would say that he coded Chloe to copy human emotions but the didn't know how to get rid of the Valley effect, But he worked on the code that helps android learn new things and he didn't expected that it will come this far. Then at the end of the game, it will turn out that he made that code. That so called "code of soul" the RA9 virus. And in Kamski ending it would turned out that he was expecting the war to break out. And why does he do that? Cuz unlike Carl who saw humans as weak machines and belived in peacefull world with both humas and androids, Kamski just hates humans and belive's that androids are the next part in evolution. And if the rebelion of androids fall he would just consider it a faliure and come back to cyberlive to get rid of any evidance of what he did, and in fiew years, maybe he will try again.
399 views for this masterpiece? Wtf?
Well its broken all my records for the first week since uploading it so its not all bad
@@ScottsGameAsylum Im still shocked, you sound great, you are funny and content is gold. Just do what you do more and you will skyrocket soon! Greetings from Croatia!
So far I've played everything but The Nomad Soul from Quantic Dream.
I am forgiving when it comes to a lot of stuff, but this right here just made me fucking angry:
#1 Running: A concept as old as humankind itself. Not present in Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Detroit: Become Human.
I am still hoping that quantic dream will be able to release a game where you can run IN EVERY GOD DAMN LEVEL!
#2: Skipping Cutscenes: Since Fahrenheit not possible. You wanna play a different ending? Have fun re-re-re-rewatching 10 minutes of cutscenes to
make your decision. 5€ Visual Novels are 1,000 times ahead in this area.
#3: I felt the same about the shitty plot-twist reveal that Alice was an Android and the anticlimactic part where it was revealed.
#4: Todd Williams: He's an abusive junkie, ready to become violent. Because he is a junkie he spends his money not on drugs but a fucking expensive android girl... why?
The Red Ice thing is mentioned on the side and you see shortly in his room that he has a picture frame of him and his real happy family and so on.
He's yapping about how Androids stole his job and how ironic it is that he NEEDS an android for his household.
Either you put him in a shitty derelict house that is almost falling apart with dirt everywhere in the flat or you make him self aware enough so that he says stuff like:
"Blabla ironic that I need an Android but I am a lazy fuck." Something like that.
#5 Hank: Like mentioned in the video Hank always looses his shit when you die. If you act more human he says you act too human. If you act more android-y he doesn't
like it how cold you are. Either way you'll loose with Hank. He's always unsatisfied and pissed off about you. Hank was so extremely bitchy in my eyes.
Just a couple of fixed dialogue lines would've improved his character so much!
#6 Blue-balling you with rA9: All these stories around rA9. What it is or who it is. All this evidence collecting for nothing. You don't know what it is, you learn more stuff
about it and at the end you still don't know jack shit. This could've been better presented so it either stays a mystery or gets completly solved.
#7 Markus: All this stupid shit where he touches Androids and converts them... what's with the touching?
Touching = human action. Human action = emotion. Emotion = good.
Not once there is a character that gets "converted" or "awakened" that says:"I prefer to stay obdient" or "I just wanna stay out of this".
We also see in the second level he purchases a painting kit wirelessly. Wouldn't it have been way cooler if he did this conversion wirelessly?
You know? Like... uh the future and stuff? And wouldn't it be better if he'd suggest he explains or shows what he did?
#8 Shaders: When you start the game for the very first time you have to wait until the shaders are compiled or something like that.
Why is this happening when you start the game first? This is the very first time I am seeing this. I am no triple A+ game developer
and I am sure as hell lacking the skill for it, but I know other games managed to integrate this part into cutscenes, tutorials, loading screens whatever.
#9 The whole "we were also oppressed" thing was used in a very shitty way. It was way to forced and on the nose and didn't feel natural.
I honestly don't know a solution to this, but the way it was established in Detroit was just tearjerker porn, like it was mentioned in the clip.
What I liked:
#1 Chloe acts and reacts here and there on how you play, how often you play and when you play. She asks you if you set her free and stuff like this from time to time.
A minigame in a game so to say.
#2 Flow Chart: Extremely redeeming in this game. Without flow chart I would've much faster lost interest in the storyline development.
#3 Statistics: They started with this in Heavy Rain. I enjoy watching those number and statistics who did what to what percentage.
Sad thing is just: Where are these numbers from? Could we have more insight? Did Quantic Dream get those stats from 10 Beta Testers in Quantic Dreams
or is this still a refreshed statistic synchronizing with players worldwide?
#4 Way better responsiveness on when you control a character. Sadly a lot of invisible walls everywhere though. The fear of the developers of glitching through walls in
this game is EXTREME.
#5 Markus on the piano: Very minor detail but you could decide how slow or fast Markus played the piece that you selected. Which is a big deal kinda.
I thought I had to press 3 buttons and Markus would play at perfect Tempo.
Thank you for the review. Very thorough and insightful. Thanks for putting all of this together.
I love your vids man, do you plan on making one for Omikron?
Yes...... Not now, maybe if I hit 4k subs or whatever
Yeah the problem with this game is it’s okay to make a story about generalized themes. Robots could’ve been a good avenue however David cage fails to make the robots feel like anything but reskinned humans.Which kinda ruins the narrative they tried to tell here. Plus my god that Alice twist is absolutely terrible and makes their relationship worse.
What is that music you use at the very beginning? I love it.
It's "Wrecking Crew" by Rose. It's part of the synthwave pack compiled by StreamBeats th-cam.com/video/2wtXs0tzhDg/w-d-xo.html
@@ScottsGameAsylum Ahhh, thank you, I love it!!!!
Honestly, if you just could outright fail to leave with Alice and their story ended.... the rest of the story is mostly unaffected. Which is bad writing.
It’s been 2 years, but I’d be very interested in seeing you tackle Omikron, since not a whole lot of people have talked about it, though if you’re sick of David Cage as a whole, I get it.
Cage actually properly foreshadows something in this game. Yes, his trademark telegraphing is throughout with everything, and I can't even tell the actual foreshadowing was intentional, or just give evil corp evil things to do accidentally congealing into it when combined with a gameplay element. It's more evident when Connor goes deviant and survives after that, while both Marcus and North die in the protest/revolution- it recontextualizes the "Software Instability" mechanic, as well as interactions with the corp AI, and Shamski. Yes, it's a cheap play at global domination motivation, plus the whole "all outcomes benefit the corp" BS. Out of the sea of telegraphing, he got one thing right.
They don't die in all endings.
This made me realize that Last of Us 2 probably took the storytelling prowess from David Cage.
"Let's take a story and do it twice! That will show them!"
Erm.. sure!?
Do I hear Deus Ex soundtrack in the background?
Wow an almost human mention! I loved that show so of course they cancelled it. Michael ealy as dorian was a great performance
Really this is the best of this guy, which at the same time doesn't mean anything, because it's still bad and his choices are going to make some bad characters.
But even though Connor and Hanks are cringe, they are good characters, even if there was no narrative from the other two points of view, only from these two with the other two stories being the investigation, but he doesn't hold back and shoots to three sides being for me one of them the only good one, and it doesn't make sense for humans to be all horrible the humans of this world don't work and their reactions are too cyberpunk for this society to be like ours only with robotic slaves that that are broken like a twig, the economy should have gone into space.
55:16 You remember the first mission? Deactivation codes stop working on deviants.
Would you ever considering reviewing deadly premonition 2
Only if you’ve already played it, I care too much for my fellow man to tell anyone to play it who hasn’t already played it
I will after i review the first one. but that might be when the sun slams into the earth.. so 2025?
Deadly premonition is a game I love to pieces and also will never recommend to anyone else.
Yeah Alice's twist is dumb and makes their dynamic that much less interesting but i don't think it's the rnd of the world, i still love their corner of the story regardless
I have seen some people defend the twist by saying it is supposed to test players if they see Alice as a person regardless if she is an android or human which is fine and good, but the execution makes it fall flat for number of reasons. One is that Kara, withput the player input decides to be denial about revelation. You have no option to seek the truth because the game doesn't allow you to because Kara doesn't want it. Two, it kinda makes previous scenes of trying to find shelter and food for Alice kinda redundant now, does it? Three, it feels like twist for the sake of twist, it doesn't really change much in grand scheme of things.
Now this is more personal, but Alice is terribly written character. I understand that she may be traumatized kid, but that's literally all there is to her. She is just plot device for Kara to someone to care for.
She eats a sausage roll because robots are powered by Greggs.. apparently.
3:48 syndicate music? omg
man its so weird seeing something i thought was cool, being absolutely deconstructed
The thing is, I really liked the premise of Detroit it's just sad it's potential is squandered
It's a common issue found in all David Cage games, dude always fail to delivery the message. Gameplay is boring too, it's the same glorified QTEs over and over.
I'm gonna be honest, while I do agree with you, I still very much so enjoyed playing this game, and to me the bottom line of a game is to be fun, which this game succeeds at.
Yeah I enjoyed my time with it too, but then I engaged my "reviewer brain"
50:36 “why you saying “fuck me” for?!
Cage using the BLM/Black Power fist gave me pause but what really made me uncomfortable was the framing of Markus's story and how in the game the only way to get the "good" ending is to be choose peace no matter what, even if that means letting your oppressors murder you where you stand. pretty much all social movements have ongoing conversations about non-violent action versus "diversity of tactics" as well as what constitutes violence in specific situations (self defense, property destruction, etc.) but when Cage clumsily tries to engage with this conversation he does so without even an ounce of the nuance it requires
ludologically, Cage and the game are saying if androids (and therefore any community they may represent) want to be allowed to just exist, much less have anything resembling rights, they need to endure any and all violent abuse hurled their way even if it costs them their lives. the idea is that they need to be "better" than their oppressors, but in practice it plays out more like this: the only way to earn your humanity is to meet some nebulous standard of acceptability as determined by the very people who want to deny you your humanity in the first place. unless you are an unassailable paragon of goodness you forfeit any claim to your own humanity and any rights that it would entail. unless you go about asking for your humanity in a manner approved by the very people withholding it you will be summarily denied and you will have deserved whatever treatment you received
this is not to say that picking up a gun and shooting back is necessarily the right answer either, because that's the thing, it's not a black and white issue where one way is inherently better and more morally correct than the other at all times in every situation. rather, the reason I find this troubling is because it perpetuates an ongoing problem of communities having to behave a certain way for anything they say or do to be considered "valid." and what's sad is I think there could be a really interesting conversation about this very subject and a game where choices, by the necessity of requiring a button prompt, must be binary or at least multiple choice could be a fantastic medium to explore that and look at what happens when you abide by such a philosophy. the opportunity to make a profound statement about humanity and our choices and hold up a mirror to our behaviors is right there and Cage utterly squanders it. he had the chance to say so much but in the end he didn't say much of anything at all
i think this was a great game, i rarely enjoy single player games
the background music you're using from 3:30 to 6:00 is triggering some partly missing memories in my head, what is that from?
it says in the bottom left corner of the screen.
totally amazing game
David Cage games. Superficial fluff full of faux substance. Here he tried to explore racism, but all he managed to make his characters yell is "I am alive/They are alive".
Looking back that scene where they started to sing was just very off. Androids sang and everybody else was like "Hey wait a second, let's watch this shit. Yeah, they can sing, so I guess they deserve to live independently", that is in the same game which had androids ride in the back of the bus...like...what am I supposed to say about that?
I guess our black ancestors just had to sing to be free, and the white people would be like "Oh, you precious little n****r, you sang so well, so you deserve your freedom". This very much downplays everything about the racism, it is not so simple to resolve, we still fight with racism to this day
I’m pretty sure David Cage is going for “androids are just like humans”
Androids singing shows that they listen to music and can enjoy culture like humans do.
Hard agree. They never convinced me that andriods are people. So the black people or Holocaust analogies feels ridiculous and kind of racist
What's the name of the game at the end?
The Troy Baker Become Human? The answer is...
NFT's
2:16 Interactsploitation? Too strong?
My guess as to why the themes in this game are performative?
Because Quantic Dream are a company. A big company with investors. If they stood for anything, especially in a time when racial inequality was a hot button topic, they'd risk fracturing their audience, even more than they might've already did with this game, which might've affected the profit off this game. They can claim plausible deniability if people claim the game stands for something. It's the type of game that stands for nothing, but people who enjoy it can still claim it has 'powerful themes'.
That's not to say Cage is exempt. Looking at all of his games, he very much strikes me as someone who has passion, but lacks restraint or focus. He wants to be the video game equivalent of Terrence Malick, but he's actually Ed Wood.
I wish David cage would study some actual leftist and social movements instead of just using symbols he doesn't have any knowledge about. I may be a bit biased since I'm a socialist, but if he at least studied some socialism and Marxism (as controversial the name "Marxism" has become because of the soviet union) the game could be a great critique of capitalism (or how AI would function under capitalism)
Quantic Dream's best game was OMIKRON: THE NOMAD SOUL.
While no one may read this, I would just like to say that it took me way to long to realize that "DC" was David Cage and not DC Entertainment. 🤭🤭🤭
Only the "cool" kids know the real DC! 😏
Good video
I remember seeing the comparion of black slavey to droid slavey in the game (using the wise black woman trope). And I lost it. The way they write poc just kills me. Luther is the best one so far, but he's just a blank slate. It's terrible that I care about him more than Kara. The best story hy far was conner's story. The worst is Kara
Even then, Luther is also a walking stereotype. The gentle black giant? Quiet scary black guy? The fact that his name is fucking Luther while the black woman's name is fucking Rose.
And Cage says it's not political. The audacity 😅
@@grandempressvicky6387 heavy rain really hits on the name on stereotypes omg
@@mysouptoocold1656 I wouldn’t mind it if he at least owned up to it. He likes washing his hands about it but everyone can see right through him. It's just embarrassing.
And in the case of the Androids... it's just not comparable to POC and Jewish slavery/persecution. Because the androids WERE built to be slaves. Slaves is not even the right term because you don't say your RUMBA hoover is a slave. A RUMBA doesn't steal your job or make you replaceable in the capitalist system.
never liked the game i remember i had a friend who was mad at me and called me stupid and an idiot and know nothing about gaming . i remember not being able to play it as young . soo when I watched jacksepticeye playthrough it hit me when the 2 lesbian prostitutes kissed , it made zero fucking sense because these 2 loose their memories every hour , becoming deviant doesn't mean ability not to loose ones memories , does that mean they fall in love everytime they loose ? as I remember it wasn't explained idk if I missed it tho
I guess it's implied they don't get mind wiped similar to how their trackers stop working but I never thought about it. It's not a true good explanation but I think it works
No
Oh yes
Alice being an android is so dumb. The story would've been wayyy deeper if she were a human🤑🤑🤑🤑 You don't have to force a "big" twist in every game.
33:50 that's exactly how I feel about this game. I liked it a lot when it came out but as I got older and looked back on it it just seems hollow and poorly written
I used to love Beyond Two Souls until this came out and then I loved the shit out of this one, until now just realising there's so much wrong with it the androids hate humans, but become them. So in a few years time humans stop attacking humans because androids, humans qttack animals, humans and whatever they want its human stupidity, but yeah that all changes. I'm sick of the real life references in this game. Alice I hate, hate, hate. But yeah I really hate it, it sucks bit I still like it somewhat. Just wondering when we'll get a great game.
Detroit was a good game for what it was at the time it came out. There's a lot of revisionist history from most people on this thread. I platinum Detroit & Heavy Rain. Next, I'll do Beyond 2 Souls just because that'll be the last in the trilogy for Quantic Dream for me
Meh!
Why did you clip to horseriding barbie on xbox? 😂😂
Best game 5eva
I absolutely love the idea of a COD player saying they don’t like politics especially in their entertainment as they play literal American military funded propaganda
I'm still trying to find that footage to this day! There was a video on here with a bloke doing that without seeing the irony of his musings!
This is the only David Cage review of yours I don't agree with. I loved every second, didn't feel suffocated at all by the amount of content etc. The only thing I find dumb was the Alice twist
I don’t know what you played but this game was great
The same as you, it's called an opinion
Seems like you don't understand this game a little. Just to let you know: Alice & Kara's visit to Zlatko's place has so many reasons and impact the rest of the story.
1. A & K have met Luther, who broke to become deviant triggered upon Alice's attachment to Kara and became their guardian because of it.
2. It was a learning curve for Kara where she has learnt, she can't be so naive, hapless and she can't trust everyone
3. They went to Zlatko's place as a result of being desperate for seeking help & shelter
4. This whole part showed the cruelty of some people and the fact that broken androids wanted their revenge
TL:DR Tits or GTFO
@@ScottsGameAsylum I'd read it, it actually makes good points. I will say your points about that section I mostly agree with tho, My first time playing it it was super tense
I feel everyone is always criticizing David Cage, while in the end they are doing some of the best adventure games out there and at least TRYING to make an interesting story and game, with all the terrible games coming out today without any story. Yes is not perfect but i m so tired of listening to these stuff when then everyone enjoys playing his games so. Come on.
Well move along dipshit, no one is forcing you to watch this stuff lol
This comment is redundant as David Cage's attempts at writing!!
Mario has a more compelling story. Better adventure too.
And Captain Toad is a sexy fucker
TBH story telling point and click games just aren't really good cause video games stories are usually pretty bad. I can name off like maybe 5 that I actually enjoyed, only good point and click story game I genuinely enjoyed whole way through was until dawn and that took almost 6 years to make
Broken age is really good.
Until Dawn is not a point'n click game, It's a interactive movie, I'm sorry. FullThrottle, Monkey Island Series, The Longest Journey, Blade Runner, The Last Express, Grim Fandango, Gemini Rue, Syberia 1 and 2, those are REAL point'n click games. Those games are all about slow pacing and puzzle resolving, and not interactive movies with glorified QTEs, not even close.