Hey all! My brother edited this video for me and it was really nice for us to work together on a project. If you have any feedback for him, please drop it here and I'll make sure he sees it :D
@@ChuggleDBuglGames If you ever need an editor, shoot me an email (address is in the about section of my channel) and I'm sure he'll always be down to help :D
I'm just absolutely disgusted at how the writers treated Sara. Like, there were a million ways to write her out without taking glee in...punishing a child for being a child, and not even really being a liability
Yeah, especially as she was neurodivergent coded! It really made me feel like complete crap as someone who would more likely be like Sarah than Clem (or more likely a mix of the two) if there was an apocalypse. But I still haven’t played S3 and still think S3 is worse just from what I’ve heard. It’s 2.99 on steam now so I might finally buy it.
Sarah had more right to be the way she is than Ben did. Ben was an adult, a naive and stupid young adult, but still an adult, and made more fuck ups than any character in the series and was given chance after chance to step up and be better, and he never did. The only thing he did right was sacrifice himself at the bell tower, which I dropped him every time.
@@LethalByChoice I wouldn't exactly call Ben an adult, but he still could've been more liable for his age even if he was very young. Like when he abandoned Clem when they were surrounded by walkers. I understand being scared, but that never should have happened where he just runs away and leaves someone to die like that.
It was definitely a sadistic treatment of mentally disabled, mentally delayed person. Like she's clearly untaught and they do everything in their power to make a child being a child their fault for dying.
This had to be the most insane episode of all of the games since way to many situations involved these grown adults looking to a child for help or input. A group full of grown people going "what should we do 11 year old!?"
Yeah, but thats one of the main problems with S2, you’re the protagonist who’s a child. If the protagonist can’t be the protagonist in their story, it would just be a boring story. So it looks like they go to a child for answers. Which is why S2 you should’ve played an adult.
@@PostCrisisRH They could've easily worked around that. They could have strong adult characters, but have Clem be guided and also pick up tactical skills from them on her own throughout the story
@@Xxdominater In a telltale game the protagonist is always front and center, if they had competent adults, Clem wouldn’t really do anything besides learn and do a few things, which is why I suggest to play as an adult instead of Clementine, as an Adult you have more say, more power, and actually can effect Clementine until the end, like S1.
I hated the fact that even if you don't steal Arvo's medicine he still ambushes you then the next episode her sister dies and also everyone of his goons but Mike and Bonnie treat him like a good person because their ambush flopped. Like they lost their memory of that said ambush that almost killed the baby that they were protecting in the first place. There should be a choice to cap Arvo when you reach his hideout where his supplies are.
Yes! If you play compassionately and treat Arvo with respect at every opportunity he'll still wig out and attack you. I was so confused on my first playthrough
@@MertKayKayAfter season 1 where Clem got taken from the guy that acts up whether you personally took from the car or not, I stopped caring about taking from people cause I just know they’re gonna come back anyway 😭🤣 might as well have the pills, y’know?
It's amazing how many odd interactions/poorly written situations could have been avoided if they just let Clementine be 15-16 in this game. All of a sudden it makes more sense why you'd send her out to do recon, do dangerous tasks, or even attempt to settle disputes. You wouldn't have a wildly over-mature child anymore, you'd just have a teen who grew up during the apocalypse, and as such knows how to do a lot of random survival shit. It would make finding anyone she knew before (like Kenny) a much more complex and emotional problem about dredging up a past she loved as a kid but could now see the cracks in through the eyes of an adult, vs a "Do I abandon my new friends or my old friends?"
The one reason that I could think of for why they didn't make clem a teen was maybe because of the massive time jump, clem's personality would be wildly different since people changes after a certain amount of time and making the time jump shorter could still give the impression that clem has grown but she would still somewhat resemble her s1 counterpart and would still be familiar to returning players
Because if they did it would fuck up the timeline for S3, and they wanted to make a story about a little girl growing up alone in the apocalypse, a reverse situation of Rick and Carl from the comic series. Why Clementine is basically doing all this work is because you’re the protagonist and as the protagonist you can not not do anything (if that makes sense lol), if the game was on par with S1 with writing and you played Clem you’d barely do anything in the story, which would be boring. To fix this you should’ve played an adult instead of Clementine (Until the end at least), it keeps the aspect of her growing up in an apocalypse but doesn’t force age her up to make the story entirely different and make Clem a generic survivor.
No, thank you. Would have preferred having to play as someone else this season, but still having Clementine young so I can see her grow. That’s what got me into her story. Would have been weird to see her be 16 all of a sudden. Wouldn’t have been attached to her as I am.
Honestly, I absolutely loved season 2. It's always been "the new frontier"/season 3 that I absolutely hated. Looking back now, I can understand the criticism that season 2 gets, but I just could not get myself to care about the characters in season 3.
Very interesting! I feel a lot of people usually have either season 2 or 3 as their least favourite. I definitely preferred 3 to 2 but I completely agree that it was super limited in... basically every way. Thank you for watching Chris
Me too. I thought season 2 was ok, but that’s it. Just ok. Season 3 made me want to bash my head into the wall. I couldn’t stand any of the characters except for Clementine.
I was so disappointed with Sarah, I thought she’d be my Clementine when I first met her, that was the death that truly broke me. She died the way she most feared no matter what I did, and it was awful.
If you want a better story for Sarah I highly recommend you search up the series "What if Lee survived" by the channel "Lightro DLC". He does a full series "what if" and rewrites the story with Lee and he has Sarah not only survive but really grow into her own as well. Definitely look it up.
young me thought she was so annoying, held the grp back on multiple life threatening occasions, years later im seeing that sarah was probably autistic and her being so encouraged carlos to keep her sheltered and close which is wrong, i feel like carlos may have had a neglectful past due to this. Same with ben, i actually hated him more than sarah because he left clementine cornered , years later realising hes just a very realistic character and if an apocalypse was to ever happen, the majority of us would be like ben😭
@@teevee7678 exactly- I was raised with a lot of autistic friends, so Sarah was very familiar to me. Her father felt like he was actively trying to get her killed the way he behaved with her. Then, there’s Ben. He had just lost his teacher and his classmate. He saw them die horribly- of course he’s a bit timid. He’s a dumbass, because we all are.
Actually I think more people hated season 3. Clem was barely playable there except in the flashbacks. Thanks to season 3 everyone looks back on season 2 more fondly. Anyway I heard the final fight was supposed to be between Luke and Kenny but Telltale killed Luke off so they needed to use Jane as a last minute replacement. Sarah was just disappointing mostly b/c they plastered her on the promo art right beside Clem and did nothing with her. On the bright side Telltale wanted to kill Clem off in a snow storm this season but changed their minds.
@@realestsienna it's definitely overhated but still the worst season. there are good things about it, but compared to season one and even the other seasons (to some degree) it's a bit lackluster imo.
On Sarah I remember an interview with some of, I think, the writers in which they talked about how much they hated her and how happy they were to finally kill her off, laughing about it the whole time. It got a lot of backlash bc people were rightfully disgusted over this treatment towards a child that was clearly written as mentally ill, she definitely had an anxiety disorder at least. So yes the developers did legitimately hate her and used her as their punching bag up until they were able to kill her which is why she dies no matter what, made even worse by the fact that if you do try to save her at every turn she dies while having a serious panic attack. I remember feeling sick to my stomach when I played through that. It was very telling of the devs' views on mental illness.
Calm yourself. It's just a game. She's also pathetic and weak. Weak people do not deserve to live in that type of world. It is the truth. Be strong and survive or be eaten. The End. There is no in between.
Or it’s just a realistic depiction of what having a disadvantage like a mental illness would bring you in a world like The Walking Dead. It’s just a simple fact that it’s a hardcore world that even the best die in. A sheltered child with a severe anxiety disorder that freezes and shuts down when stressed would just not make it in such a world. It’s the Jane’s that make it. The people who don’t give a fuck about others and are legit pretty terrible. Sarah dies no matter what because she *would* die no matter what.
@@princeytron LOL the janes make it? buddy jane hung herself at the first sign of a baby. she didn't even go out to look for no plan B she just took the test and tied up a rope 🤣if anything, its the kennys & carvers that will make it. you're fucking delusional.
frankly i think any complaints about sarah being handled how she was are coming from a place of insecure projection, in the real world? in a situation like this? Sarah isn't going to make it. its a miracle she was even there at the cabin 2 years in with how dumb carlos was. his refusal to teach his daughter how the world had changed was her downfall. its tragic, and not her fault. Clementine survived because she was hardened and adapted quickly in a cruel world, thankfully what lee taught her managed to put her in the position she landed in. Sarah's lack of experience & refusal to learn landed her exactly where she ends up. I think it makes total sense. Her death in the trailer park is upsetting because its powerful. though i will say: if telltale where actually serious about "Choices mattering" they would have given us a way to ultimately make her determinate. teaching her to use a gun is so pointless making her determinant in the trailer park is super silly. i think having her death be an unavoidable situation due to the set of circumstances she was delt is a much more powerful way for the character to go. Slapping her to her senses is satisfying because you get the idea that she might come to understand and live but ultimately it amounts to nothing. that part i can understand being criticized - its just poor writing but frankly the mass majority of the fourth episode is a dumpster fire in the writing department so sarahs character being handled poorly is at the very bottom of my list of issues. Nick comes to mind before she does, man is so utterly pointless its actually insane.
I was going to ask if you’d be willing to cover season 2 as I really loved your first video. I’m very excited to watch and this is also my formal request for you to cover seasons 3 & 4. Also, I find season 2 to be the one that stands out in my memory and Kenny to be one of the most interesting adaptations of a character I used to love. I suppose season 2 was unique in a way I rarely see (Atleast Kenny was, I hated nearly every other aspect of the story lol). Keep up the great content!
Wendigoon, the fact that you watch my videos is actually immensely flattering, thank you! I definitely will be covering the rest of them asap. Moreover, I watched your video on the Mandela Catalogue the other day and I very nearly had to sleep with the light on. And the Rockefeller bloke who had a nasty run-in with cannibals (or so it seemed). Thanks for making amazing stuff :D
I just wish they knew what they really wanted to do with Kenny; in early concepts he was supposed to be the villain of Season 2 and it shows at times, but at the same time they want to make him the second protagonist again and make you like him. They tried to make this weird balance between him being an uncontrollable asshole and a loving uncle but it worked at best 50% of the time... Which was still enough to make him the best character in this season... And that says quite a lot about the other characters.
Lee must be the most incredibly written protagonist, because all the way through S2 I was constantly wishing that he was still alive. And then getting genuinely sad when once again accepting that he wasn't. The amount of loss evoked from a fictional character- in me, at least- is really incredible.
One thing that really bothers me about season 2 is some of the characters have no idea what they're doing for example: Carlos claims to be a doctor but for some reason when he saw the bite on clementine's arm, he couldn't even tell if it was a walker bite or a dog bite and for that he locks clem in a shed where she had to fight for her life. p.s: I killed bonnie because she's a snake and you know what they say "Kill the snake before it bites."
Yes that's so true! Walkers with human teeth versus sharp dog teeth? Different sized mouths, plus she'd probably stink of dog too. That really bothered me as well
I know its late but I saw a theory that Carlos wasnt actually a doctor and only pretended because being a doctor in the post apocalypse make people more likely to protect you. There's not much actually pointing to it other than him being medically incompetent but its a headcanon I tend to go with.
@@eva1585that would make sense with how everyone needs to learn basic medicine to survive. Even in this season clementine had to stitch up her own arm as an 11 year old. Give a man enough time and he can pretend his way enough until a real doctor shows up to call him out.
Carlos notr recognising the bite could be excused if we asume it was REALLY bad. What really did me is the fact that he claimed that fever would show if Clem was bitten or not, as if pain or most other infections can't cause that.
It would have been a much more compelling story had they kept Christa around to try and raise Clem. They could have had her cold off put demeanor towards Clem as an interesting storytelling point to contrast to the warmth and comfort Lee (presumingly the headcanon the writers preferred) had provided for Clem, giving a good jumping-off point for Clem to become hardened and to maybe drive a better selling point why she might want to join up the new group despite their less than stellar welcome. Or perhaps just have Christa and Clem band together and then have Kenny come in to offer a place with him instead, still doing the Blood v.s Water thing but with two characters we actually would know and root for (for different reasons)
that would have been the worst and they re would have been completly no point in doing this as it would just be a copy of season 1 but with Christa ?? I mean don t like the season if you want but at least it showed how Clem grew up and how she was affected by the apocalypse and Lee.
Really loved your point on the "marked for death" halo placed on characters. It's a real shame that Telltale did not put more resources into their characters, if they truly did intend for your decisions to matter, especially decisions that were life or death for these characters, then why let their lives drag on while they're waiting for death that's inevitable.
I agree, season 3 was terrible, it's made me hesitant to start season 4. S3 introduced one of my favorite character designs in Ava, and did nothing with her, marked her for death, and then killed her without ever showing her die... Terrible.
@@martyscurllisinnocent4324 you know for a long time I was thinking of doing a video explaining why ANF is actually the best season. If me saying I enjoy it the most makes people think "HoW Is ThAt EvEn PoSsIbLe" then I will do in fact do it
I won’t say anything regarding Kenny because he is a complicated character but Jane…I’m going to have to respectfully disagree about her being a good role model to Clem. To me and a lot of my friends who have played twdg, Jane is the exact opposite of Molly from s1 and it’s so bizarre. Molly despised the survival of the fittest mentality that Crawford had regarding anyone that needed any kind of special treatment, including children, the elderly and those with medical problems unrelated to the apocalypse. She just wanted her and her sister to survive and didn’t think her sister’s diabetes should’ve denied them support. By meeting her, we learn that everyone deserves to live and that someone’s unchangeable traits shouldn’t doesn’t make them any lesser or unworthy of living or being protected. And then here comes Jane with the exact opposite mindset, telling you never to stick around for or get close to anyone that could be considered a liability and Sarah, a very young girl who is clearly autistic coded, is treated like a liability because she’s “weak.” I’m also not a huge fan of how you discuss Jane’s sister and her death and how she had “given up”. She was clearly suicidal and in pain and Jane encouraged her that this is what she wanted when they were cornered and just left her to be eaten by walkers, what I can only imagine is the worst way to go. Even if it would’ve been hard for Jane to save her, it’s disgusting that she handled it that way. She helps Clem and teaches her these things because she can tell she’s already very survival focused and is written to be mature. Yet she doesn’t extend any of this help (from what I can recall) to Sarah, because she already views her as a broken lost cause. I also felt like it was unnecessary to bring up if you think whether or not Sarah wanted to die because quite frankly it’s irrelevant. She’s a young sheltered autistic girl who’s been protected by her father her entire life and has a complete mental break down when he dies which leaves her in a catatonic state in the RV. As someone on the spectrum who’s had very intense panic attacks in the past, sometimes even while proclaiming that I want to die, I never actually wanted to. It’s just the only thing I could think of and in the moment, I wrongly assumed that me dying was the only way to stop my pain. I know that in the apocalypse, not everything is easy and you can’t be soft and gentle all the time and you need that tough love and douse of reality but Jane’s view of the world and people deeply troubles me, again, maybe because I heavily relate to Sarah and see a lot of her traits in me
Wait how is Sarah Autistic, is it because her dad (Couldn’t remember his name) said in episode one he said “If she see what actually the real world she would flip out” (That’s not what actually he said but I couldn’t remember what he fully said.
I’m autistic and never once did I get “autistic coded” from Sarah. She is literally shown to be completely sheltered, thus left ignorant, by Carlos. He doesn’t allow her to know anything about how bad the world is, and as a result, she doesn’t know how to survive. And those are the vibes I, personally, got from her. She’s ignorant, and that’s what makes her “weak”, even though it isn’t her fault.
@@smileymctrashbag Yeah me too, I just thought when she witnessed her father dying that she was so traumatized that it cause her to be a wreck. Since Carlos babysit her for a long time it made Sarah think he is the only person to trust and when she lost him it cause her to have a hard time to do it since she alone.
I liked Nick I wanted him to get a redemption ark so bad, I even thought he would until I got him to far in the story and they just killed him off screen and you have to kill him as a walker stuck in the fence. I thought that was so lame, I was so excited to find him again and there he was, a walker that was helplessly stuck in a chain link fence, it felt like everything I did to get him that far wasn’t even worth it, almost like I should have let him die where the game had intended it the first time.
I was the same. I’m fact the whole cabin group (minus Pete) I believe could’ve had more done with them. Nick could’ve had a story about Clem honouring a dying man’s wish/ showing him there’s more to live for more than just breathing. Sarah could’ve been about showing she can survive. Alvin could’ve showed he’s not all good with him murdering a man at Howe’s. Rebecca could’ve improved with us finding about her past with Carver and maybe we find out Alvin can’t have children and in a drunken state she sleeps with Carver. Giving more nuance. Carlos we could have found out he intentionally lied about the dog bite, where his wife is, him being untrusting and stuff. Luke just should’ve taken Jane’s place in fight against Kenny. And if we had to create a reason of why Luke would fight Kenny, we could have a potential miscommunication between the two over AJ’s fate. Oh, and I would’ve had Sarah and Nick be additional optional characters to survive the season along with Kenny or Luke
I know you were joking but no one can pretend Christa's baby survived. During episode 4 when Rebecca gives birth, the baby is still at first, and Clem says, "Oh no, not again." But then the baby breathes, etc
Season 2 is just one of those messes where it feels like all of your choices don't matter, and if you pick Jane you get this horrible ending where she basically manipulates you, gets pregnant, and then commits suicide on you. At least Kenny stuck with you until The bitter end, and I feel like that was a better ending than anything else this season had to offer to me.
Sara is a really interesting, wasted character imo in that the game devs clearly didn't like her and didn't want you to like her. She just doesn't really exist for much outside of a dev punching bag and a character for the players to be annoyed with. Interesting to note, but as it was released I remember quite a few autistic people relating to her because of the way she was written, even if she wasn't written well or treated well either. As an autistic person who didn't know I was autistic as the game was released, it's interesting to look back on and realize that may have been at least a facet of why her whole presence in the game just felt kind of bad.
god that's even more disturbing looking back. it doesn't help that i kind of looked like sarah did at that age, so it was incredibly distressing to watch her die so horribly >_
I think it would have been interesting Sarah to adapt and grow strong with help of Clementine, despite not been used to harsh world and is traumatized. But of course, that didn't happen because devs hated her :/
My baby Sarah deserved better. Also, spoilers for the final season here. I think it's funny to play Lee as the one guy that tries to be a mediator in the conflict between Lily and Kenny and even be sympathetic towards her father's death (who he can also try to save), while Clementine in the final season can tell her her father was an asshole and so is Lilly.
Honestly the way most fans feel about the characters in New Frontier is how I felt about the characters in Season Two. All of the adults that Clementine found herself stuck with in that game were infuriating to me, aside from Kenny. I don't understand how they could pat themselves on the back for leaving Clem to die in a shed (if they were so concerned about her turning they could have literally tied her up inside, but they were all so coddled by Carver that they didn't even consider it), then getting this child and Kenny's group kidnapped and thrown into a labour camp AFTER getting two innocent people murdered from his tiny group, and then ONCE THEY ESCAPE THEY WANT TO BERATE THE ONLY HARDENED AND CAPABLE APOCALYPSE SURVIVOR BECAUSE HE WAS (rightfully) ANGRY??? Don't even get me started on how Clem got shot because Bonnie and Mike wanted to rob and abandon the group cuz they felt bad for Arvo. Jane whole ass risked the life of an infant just so she could have Clem shoot a dear old friend at the end, but I was supposed to WANT to go with her? I hated all the new characters in Season Two. Kenny may have been pissed after that group came along and fucked up what he had found, yet he was always the first to step up and protect the remaining survivors despite his rage. You could probably tell from my rant that I happily let Kenny stab Jane to death at the end because I was relieved to FINALLY be free of the people who had very little regard for the safety of Clem, and yes I did ugly cry when Clem and AJ split from Kenny to be safe in Wellington.
I personally see this season as a very big mixed bag. Some characters I really liked (Luke and Pete), some I absolutely had no sympathy for, (Jane and Bonnie). I'm actually kinda disappointed with the end result, but that may be because of how much I loved the first season. Regardless, I can't wait to see hear your opinions on the next two seasons when they are ready! :D
Thank you Sparrow! I really liked Luke and Pete too, I feel like there was missed potential with them. I sincerely hope you enjoy the video, thank you for watching
@i gotsa know! maybe some but I’ve personally never liked her as a character you can tell she’s a snake from the very beginning when she first appears in the 400 days dlc. Her whole “character arch” is cheater, then liar, and finally backstabber. Def the worse character imo
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this season. I loved that Kenny returned but I feel like he gets way too much hate. People keep saying that he was a monster and that he didn’t love Clementine or cared about her and I saw so many people defend Jane for hiding AJ in the frozen car by saying that she was in the right to do that. I hated that everyone made Kenny look like a bad person and expected Clementine to do everything since she was the main character.
I agree with you. I don’t think Kenny didn’t love her, I think having lost Katjaa/Duck in the first game broke him mentally. It makes plenty of sense to me that he is more easily irritated, and ready to snap over every little thing. He never really got to grieve his first loss, then he loses Sarita, too. He’s lost literally anyone he loves, and he can’t take it. He snaps at Clem and pushes her away and blames her for things, because if he gets too close, he’ll lose her too. Really, Clem/Kenny are all the other has left of Lee, too. So it’s like Kenny would be losing him again.
@@smileymctrashbag I agree that it makes sense for Kenny to become the person he is in season 2, but I don't think that absolves him. Even as much as he's been through is not an excuse to lash out at everyone around you and be violent. There are people who have been through worse and were still better people afterward. As good as the ending is when you leave with him, only to stay at the safe zone without him, it feels dirty after letting him murder Jane, even though I didn't like her at all and really liked Kenny. I like that when you stop him, he realizes how far gone he was and tells Clem that it was the right choice before he dies. Morally, I think it really is, even though Clem being alone with the baby or with Jane are the worse options as far as survival goes.
You absolutely nailed all the reasons I was so disappointed with season 2. It makes sense when people defer to Lee for group decisions in season 1. He’s, y’know, an actual adult who provides not just for Clementine, but also for the group as a whole. He’s constantly volunteering to get them supplies, go hunting, etc. Here we have season 2, where grown adults are deferring to a child who they’ve only met not 48 hours earlier. In some of their cases, they even tried to kill her. So why are they allowing her to make all of these big decisions for the group?? The writers clearly never cared to even try and justify this, so this issue hangs over the story like a giant cloud. Another point is that, while in season 1, yes, choices were absolutely limited and sometimes didn’t make a big difference in the story, you still *felt* as though your decisions had weight. In season 2, this is all thrown out. Your choices explicitly don’t matter and no matter what you do, what you say, how you act, you will always end up with the same, all encompassing choice between Kenny and Jane in the end. Like, give me options. Let me be close with Jane, or Luke, or Kenny, or hell, wild idea, let Clementine side with Carver. Give me freedom to decide who the next ‘Lee’ is, and let me explore that relationship to their fullest extent. Let me interact with the world instead of forcing me to sit down and just let the world happen to me. Anyways, seriously amazing video, both the commentary and the editing. You and your brother did a great job and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing your take on such a disappointment of a game.
If I had a nickel for everytime a zombie apocalypse game where the main character is a father surrogate trying teach a child how to survive became critically acclaimed and then had a sequel so many people hated, I'd have two nickels.
When it comes to the ending and choice between Kenny and Jane, having been abused, both mentally and physically by a woman who is a copy paste image of Jane, I could never trust her. Her having almost all the same manipulative and antisocial characteristics, I only disliked her more the longer she was on screen.
Exactly, Kenny my be rough around the edges but Jane is just an awful person. Her complete and utter selfishness is just confirmed in the next game when she kills herself after she finds out she’s pregnant and leaves Clementine and AJ completely alone after already leaving her once before
@@MarcellusMaize Many people argue that Jane's flashback death goes against her character but from what I've seen, it works perfectly, exposing her inner cowardice and selfishness.
Hey! I forgot where I heard this, I think in extra features for the 4th season, but Christa was GOING TO BE IN SEASON 4 as friend/enemy but INSTEAD they brought back Lily because Lily would make more sense to be a villain.
i just want to say. i literally have never touched a console controller in my life but i watch your videos religiously; you have almost made me throw up laughing before and i actually started “trophy” achievement hunting through my apple arcade games because of you! i love your content dearly please never stop
I felt the thing about Sarah so hard. I remember playing through and kind of getting attached to her, and feeling so uncomfortable with how the game treated her. The absolute contempt the narrative had for her was so sad
MertKayKay: Jane is a better person than Kenny. The end of s2 and flashback with Jane in s3: - Jane admitted that she lied about AJ's death so she can show Clem how dangerous Kenny is despite the lost him losing everything such as his family, his eye, and his girlfriend. Developing the need to protect his two kids to never go through the pain again. (Jane lives) - As Clem was leaving her, Jane manipulated her into staying with her (Leave Jane) - Hanged herself after a few months (s3 flashback with Jane) The end of s2 and flashback with Kenny in s3: - Kenny admitted Clem that he let her and everyone down as he was dying (Kill Kenny) - Begs Edith to let Clem and AJ stay in Wellington to have a better life. (Go to Wellington) - Tells Clem he doesn't trust himself with AJ and admits she'll be better off without him (Leave Kenny) - Kenny stuck around with Clem for a few years. Teaching her how to drive (s3 flashback) - Sacrificed himself so Clem and AJ can escape. (s3 flashback) So tell me again who's the better person?
The two things about Season 2 that absolutely pissed me off to no end and made me give up on the writing completely: 1. Despite going against Kenny whenever possible after he started showing his abusive and unstable tendencies, when the reasonable characters elect to leave this shitshow and I chose the dialogue option to try and go with them, Arvo still shot Clem for being liked by Kenny. 2. At the end, after shooting and killing Kenny because holy shit was he a problem, there's no dialogue option with Jane to point out how fucked up and horrible her idea of "hey let's provoke the unstable and violent man by pretending to let the baby die" was but still stay with her out of pragmatism, your choices are either thanking her for opening your eyes about how bad Kenny was because Clem is so naïve she never noticed, or angrily refusing to have anything to do with her and walking off on your own with the baby (because an 11 year old and a baby surviving in a snowstorm on their own is a great idea). It's such a horrible black and white choice where your only options are the two extremes.
Absolutely agree, the season is absolutely crammed full of dialogue options that never actually address what you want to address, so it's frustrating on such a fundamental level
I get what you’re saying but Jane was definitely worse than Kenny but also Mike, Bonnie (if she’s alive) & Arvo were iffy too, I get that Kenny was unstable but he was still more trustworthy than anyone else that was alive at that point when they were going to steal all the rations and the truck smh, but you only focused on Kenny & not Jane who later on if you killed Kenny, basically gives up on you by saying she wasn’t ever going to leave you again then finds out that she’s pregnant then off’d herself, but Kenny is the only bad guy lol okay
@@justin219 Which is unfair because Arvo and his group decides to attack you regardless of if you steal from Arvo or not & his irrational mind didn’t absorb the fact that his sister was already dead and reanimated when killed ended her smh, Season 3 is still the worst season lol
as for the jane vs kenny fight, i dont remember where i saw this but i believe it was supposed to be kenny vs luke with luke playing a bigger role in clem’s story but too many people were guessing the ending so the writers changed the story last minute. i’m not sure if this was a theory or if it was in fact confirmed, but it kinda shows in the writing.
Somewhat correct, they decided to kill Luke for dramatic effect, and also scrapped the off-screen point system that would affect the character's strength and dialogue during the final fight.
I felt season 2 set the expectations for future seasons in a very negative way. After season 1 many players expected that final set of actions would be the edifice that would determine Clementine's path forward but instead they went the opposite path. Once you started the season the first episode would erase the previous cast and give you a new set. Creating a hard restart but peppering in things for returning players. So when Season 3 and The Final Season began players would expect the same treatment, mostly everyone is gone from the previous season and we are starting fresh. With that direction set it was hard to grow attach to anyone. I agree with you this was likely done because of Telltale's poor management that had their staff crunching to shove games out. Unlike Doug/Carley's death which was to establish that death can happen and at unexpected times much of the cast in season 2 just dropped in the most bewildering ways possible. Like they were trying to get rid of them to set up season 3. Which starts by erasing your final decision of season 2 like it didn't matter.
Very true! Every season they wiped the slate clean and everyone would be dead or gone by the end of it, all cleaned up ready for the next cast. As I played through the series it started to make choices feel very hollow, knowing that the game would remove those choices at a moment's notice. Thanks for watching Harbinger
Despite how the studio ended, and the whole mess there, it is nice to see someone talking about one of their games again. They made some great stuff, and (even if the video is critical) it's good to remind people that these games are out there.
Hey Simon! And yes I agree! Most of the issues with this season were definitely down to crunch and resources so it could have gone somewhere really good with it I think
See I never got why people still considered THIS season the bad one of the 4. Yeah, it's a downgrade from one but it still had that great throughline of Kenny and Clem that really held it all together for me. Their reunion at the lodge is still a top 10 gaming moment for me. It just hits the emotional beat so perfectly. I never understood why you'd side with Jane come the ending, I never trusted her and expected her to run off with Arvo and Mike but just didn't. Kennys impulsive but its because he lost 3 families, 1 by blood and 2 found families. He's an old broken man holding onto any innocence he can find in this world, and that's Clem and AJ. Jane felt like a cold person who avoided attachment because it'd make it harder for her to survive. Kennys a man weighed down by his emotional attachments while Jane intentionally avoids them to avoid the same weight Kenny faces.
While I agree with you on the storyline with Kenny being very emotionally compelling and this season not being the worst... Yeah I can't agree on trusting Kenny by the end of the season. For me he doesn't just come across like a father figure, he's basically the same guy my actual dad is. Ie, has an untrusting, abusive streak whenever he loses his temper, but gentle and seemingly understanding when he's calm and with people he's willing to trust. It's not a good trait, and it's never just because of what they lose. It's a result of emotional dysregulation (which to be fair can be worsened by trauma), and however much they insist they'll never hurt the ones they love, they always do in the end, indirectly or otherwise. Kenny is self destructive, and by the end of the season he's thoroughly in the wrong, especially with trying to kill Jane. No matter how much you trust her, he's crossing a line. Even though I first played this before going no contact with my own father, I could see how bad of a decision it would be to stick by Kenny in the last choice. Kenny is the kind of guy who would just keep making the same choices no matter how many times he sees the consequences of his own actions. It's sad, and horrible, but there's no saving him from that even if you side with him and let him kill Jane.
@@Dan2907 Not really arguing, it's just my take on Kenny given my experience with how dudes like this act irl. He can't be trusted by the end of the season because by then he's shown he'll consistently choose actions that are aggressive and self destructive, without stopping to consider whether those actions will harm himself or others (including the people he says he cares for or trust). It's not about whether he lies or tells the truth, it's that he acts on his first angry impulse regardless of how harmful that could be. He ends up provoking completely unnecessary fights and arguments, he doesn't place a reasonable amount of trust in others even when not doing that will make the situation harder or more dangerous, etc. Kenny can't always have only people he trusts around him, not that it stops him from making harmful decisions on impulse. In TWD, you have to be willing to take at least some chances on people around you to survive, or at least not turn everything into another argument or fight. Kenny doesn't do that, he constantly escalates things. It makes him self destructive and dangerous to everyone. Also, while I'm not going to defend Jane's actions, I really don't buy that attacking Jane is justified. At the point he does that he doesn't know how she supposedly lost AJ, he doesn't wait to hear a reason or explanation, she's not an active threat to either Kenny or Clem in that moment, Kenny is just doing his usual routine of acting on his anger without thinking. That's not good enough. _Unknown_ to Kenny, Jane is doing what Kenny does, making an impulsive bad decision to provoke a fight (against her own character motivations, frustratingly). She's equally to blame in that contrived and stupid situation, but that doesn't justify Kenny escalating the situation and attacking her from the start, or killing her depending on whether Clem intervenes or not. That Clem ends up in a situation where she has to shoot Kenny to prevent him from killing someone is a direct result of Kenny's decisions, and one that's unfair and traumatic for Clem no matter what decision is made. He put the child he was caring for in an emotionally devastating position because he couldn't control his own anger. All he needed to do to avoid escalating that situation was to talk. Even losing his temper and arguing in this one situation would be understandable, and it would still avoid the outcome we got. Attacking Jane was the worst decision he could make, and he did it without thought or regard for even the child he was supposed to protect.
@@thatboringone7851 completely disagree with ur take on Kenny Jane literally lied to Kenny about aj to see his reaction when she knew he's already lost a son n thinks of aj as his own Jane sucks and she kills herself later anyways while Kenny literally gives up his spot for Clementine and aj to stay safe at the base forget where it is Jane sucks
34:30 Um, maybe I'm just naive, but Larry's beef with Lee wasn't his race, but because he paid enough attention to the news to know Lee was a murderer. Lee has the option to claim Larry's a racist asshole, but that's implied to be his way of obfuscating from Mark Larry's real beef with him. The only character I think was maybe racist was Andy St. John from Episode 2, since he called Lee "boy" a couple times.
Larry ain’t racist, Larry even said he’d hurt Lee if anything happened to Clem who in canon is a black girl, most racists hate race regardless of age or sex, Larry ain’t one of them, but he’s a hard ass who gave everyone but his daughter a hard time.
@@hannahmariewilliams3548 I agree, its also the south in 2003, way different of a time. I personally think Larry was a supporter of the Senator he killed, since besides Larry, Lilly and Carley know what he did, but they don’t seem to care as much as him. Psa: Lilly deserves more respect
@@PostCrisisRH I totally forgot the person Lee killed was a senator. How the fuck does everyone not know who Lee is? Killing a local congressman kinda makes the news.
@@Adsper2000 Depends on if they cared or saw his face, how I see it people know the name from Lee Everett on the radio, so he shortens it to just Lee because anyone could be named that I guess.
And as for the big man Kenny... I just wish they knew what they really wanted to do with Kenny; in early concepts he was supposed to be the villain of Season 2 and it shows at times, but at the same time they want to make him the second protagonist again and make you like him. They tried to make this weird balance between him being an uncontrollable asshole and a loving uncle but it worked at best 50% of the time... Which was still enough to make him the best character in this season... And that says quite a lot about the other characters.
season 2 was so messy… they really didn’t know how to transfer the gameplay and responsibility the player got while playing as Lee and so it just comes across as super jarring when a group of adults are looking to a kid for help. it made all those characters come off as fumbling clowns who were completely doomed. imo season 3 worked much better because Javi was at least a capable and fleshed out character, but maybe that’s a controversial opinion. i still feel fond of season 2 though, but maybe that’s just nostalgia talking
Jane endangered the life of a baby, putting it in a car in a blizzard, to prove a point. There's literally no car that is warm enough that is off. Kenny all day!
Just saw this today and I think you really nailed it on analyzing the difference between the story-writing and the characters in this game in comparison to the first season. And having to learn that the event for either saving or leaving Sarah is just called "A Heavy Burden". Like not even just picking one or the other, just either way! That is so wrong! That has to be the worst thing they ever decided! She can be a little annoying when she's acting clingy when you first meet, but that doesn't mean she deserves to basically be given depression for living or have her grave danced on for dying.
Sarah's death is what completely turned me off of Team Luke and Jane. Like how dumb and irresponsible can you be to have sex when your supposed to be on look-out, in the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, and then go "well it's been awhile" when it gets a group member killed? Unbelievable. It felt at the end I was given the choice of 'mentally and emotionally dealing with crazy until Kenny dies' or 'go with Jane and risk dying for some selfish whim', so I went with crazy.
The problem ends up being that as bad as Kenny is Jane's not much better. I feel like the best route was to kill Kenny and then ditch Jane. It's a shit sandwich all the way around, but that's the ingredients the game gives you.
@@forwardtsender8573 With how Jane and Kenny both unceremoniously die at the beginning of the third game I think that was the ending the devs were pushing for. It's just without the knowledge of what happens in 3 it seemed dumb to send off an 11 year old by herself with a baby, but they make it anyway so whatever
This season was screwed over hard by higher ups, budget and constant rewrites, if I’m not mistaken higher ups basically made the writers rewrite the script completely so many times, it’s why there’s that like… weird ‘competition’ between Luke and Kenny, it’s also why certain dialogue is hella weird, i think some of the writers called them ‘relics’ from the old scripts, which is why some characters just die for no reason, disappear, say weird things or have weird tension that goes nowhere
I didn’t initially hate season 2, first time through it I loved it, but I was also a lot younger and not as critical of the media I consume, what I really hate about season 2 is that it wrote all the adults to be incompetent morons and they leave all the hard decisions to a little girl, and blaming her when things go wrong (*COUGH* Bonnie) I can understand that they wanted the player to feel important and more engaged with the plot but it just doesn’t work considering they’re all much older than her. That and the game constantly traumatizes her without having anything meaningful to say about that trauma, it passes off constant horrific events that happen left and right as “character development” Trauma is an important part of character development, especially in a series like The Walking Dead, but it has to be handled correctly, nothing that happens in S2 feels organic or earned, it just constantly has horrible sh*t happen to her, a lot of times out of no where (like arvo shooting her) It’s cheap hollow trauma with cheap shock factor tossed in the mix with a bunch of incompetent moronic adults making horrible decisions and leaving the hard choices to her. It’s poorly written and poorly executed. You cannot use cheap trauma as an avenue to character development, and with how she was in season 3 it wasn’t worth it because she was extremely 1 note and shallow, and in season 2 she’s barely a character, she’s just a vessel for you to control, she hardly ever expresses herself or argues with anyone, and when she does it’s half baked at best, she’s so submissive to the characters around her and plot, she doesn’t feel like a person, just an object that becomes the seasons punching bag to constantly traumatize her. Awful terrible season. Worst one they made.
Oh my gosh yes, absolutely agree. The adults letting her make all the decisions was completely absurd. They definitely gave Clem a more mature outlook and sometimes you can just hear the writers talking directly through her, and it makes the game and the relationships in the game feel so strange, especially when they boil it down to silly things like "well who are you sitting with at lunch?" The trauma that you mentioned is definitely a huge deal. Clementine gets absolutely battered back and forth in some of the worst, most gratuitous ways, I guess to demonstrate her toughness? But in the end you're just watching a little girl get the shit beaten out of her and it's exhausting.
@@MertKayKay in season 4 she’s a much stronger character but we don’t see her transition from her 1 note season 3 self to her more complex and realistic season 4 self. The transition feels kind of strange cause there’s a whole lot of context we’re just not shown or told. They’re two completely different characters lol.
You hit every note on the reason why I don’t like this season. It doesn’t help the fact that in season three she just acts like the group that she met in season two. People act like none of the characters are likable in season three, but honestly for me, Clementine is one of the worst in season three, I guess they decided if she was going to be so traumatized in season two that they might as well make her a jerk in response to it
I’m extremely thankful that they reeled her character back in for season four, but it’s also a shame we won’t see Javier anymore, personally, I liked him a lot, and I should’ve expected the season with the most changeable outcomes not to have a continuation because they’d probably think it’s too hard to make an episode stacked on all the optional outcomes
@@dawsond4123Javier was a great character, he was the highlight of S3 for me. It’s just a shame he’s surrounded by terrible writing cause he’s just such a likable character. He’s got Charisma in droves.
I know it would be technically impossible, especially considering the conditions at telltale, but i wish they made decisions stick more between games. Each season operates, for the most part, completely independently from the decisions in the prior season, i guess that’s the illusion of choice in these games. I thought your analysis was great! S2 really killed the momentum of the series
I remember trying to play season 2 when I was pretty young, at least to be playing a game like this. Anyways, I tried to explain the plot to my mom, because she was a big Walking Dead TV show fan, and I remember so vividly her telling me that she wasn’t sure if she wanted me playing based on what I was describing… and honestly she was right. I’ve tried to return and finish this series since, but GODDAMN it’s just way too bleak for me. Please, please make videos on the rest of the seasons so I can find out what I missed
I loved the characters in this season but my only real problem was how it felt like they mischaracterized Kenny. In season one he was a reasonable man and although he was angry a lot you could always see why. Season 2 they just made him weirdly aggressive and kind of manipulative towards clem
@@i.iconicannie7923 yeah im playing through for the first time and about to start S2 Ep 5 (i know i got a decision to make lol) sided with Kenny with basically every decision besides killing Larry and i punched him (cause bro shit hell understand) and i became the devil incarnate. Hated him since and then his reaction to Sarita dying hate him more. Idk who im picking tho at the end 😭 SN: he called me unfit for clem and stayed back thats what really did it tbh
Another issue is that the game keeps you distracted by all the plot detours and romantic misunderstandings that the charming idysincrasy of the series is sometimes lost in all the noise. This game has a really unpleasant centerfold sheen to it and the narrative has a very lather, rinse, repeat nature. Also Carvers introduction defies logic. He is wondering around a cabin all by himself expecting to kidnap a group of people who outnumber him. He wasted ammo and stamina tracking down a woman only to threaten to kill her the next day. He was really just a tired plot device used to pad the game. If you remove him from the plot nothing would really change. I'll give him credit in one aspect. He was intimidating unlike LILLY or the Stanger. Those two had no tangible menace.
Kenny is Clem's abusive father. That doesn't mean he doesn't love her. Because he does. But he's not healthy. He's not mentally stable or able to be a good father to anyone. I loved Kenny, mostly because he's so much like my own father, who I love so... So much... But he's not good, not good for me, not good for anyone. He's even a bearded skinny Floridian lol. I think this game handled Kenny pretty well. And his "redemption" in the end if you kill or leave him isn't really a redemption. He wasn't a "softie all along". He just knows that he's not good for you. He knows you're you're better off without him, and he doesn't want you to feel guilt for it. I like it.
You know I feel sometimes the "marked for death" halo could just be avoided not for every character but some. I'm sure after a near death event some characters if they were just given an out after surviving would leave. You could even have a moment where they say there goodbyes and just leave, you wouldn't just have to drag along a character that was already meant to be dead.
I hated the way the writers handle Sarah's character. It made me appericate Season 1 more for allowing Clementine to act like a child, without dehumanizing her as a being a "liability" or paint her as "annoying" for behaving like a child. It's like the players who found Sarah to be annoying got what they wanted since the game never tries to make the played feel gulity for treating Sarah like shit.
No hate or anything but I completely disagree with your Kenny and Jane analysis. Kenny has very valid reasons to be angry throughout the game. Though he does have his moments where he's tripping, most of the major things he was valid on. He didn't really have time to get over his hate for the group before they started causing trouble. They invite the group in, only for them to refuse to put down their weapons. And so they're off to a bad start, then some crazy guy and his group(Carver) shows up and attacks them, killing Walter. Then carver snatches them up and takes them to his camp. Though I will say Kenny was being stupid in the ride to the camp, he was trying to escape the situation that these strangers brought to his doorstep and got him involved in. Then he talks of making plans to escape and they're kinda just like, "whatever Kenny, behave" which is understandable because they're scared of carver but also annoying for Kenny cause he doesn't wanna be stuck there. Then the escape plan goes bad and his eye gets hurt. Then sarita dies, then the baby is born and the arvo incident happens and everyone acts like he's a horrible monster for being mad at Arvo, who got them into this mess, then Jane hides AJ to start a conflict. Meanwhile Jane is horrible and selfish. The only thing useful about her is her survival skills. She doesn't care about clem and only looks out for herself. She constantly encourages clem to abandon everything else and be a loner.
Season 2 had a lot of changes in production. Rewrites were made constantly so the fact that it resembles some sort of a semi-coherent story is pretty surprising. It's a hot mess though.
The experiment that was telltale will never not live in my head rent free. I love the choose your own adventure format but outside of text based games, open world games that don’t care when you tackle the plot like Skyrim, or real short moments like the Stanley parable, a narrative driven game just can’t be it unless you have the resources to make 400 games into just one game. Outside of the fact that they were just crapping out games every month it felt like, I think a big problem they had both externally and internally, and it shows in this season especially, that they hyped and seemed to believe in their own hype that these games cared about your choices. That was there thing and they wanted it to be their thing, but it just wasn’t. They were graphic novels with 3d models and quick time events, which is rad, but they would never admit it. Not even to mention the fact I can’t even imagine the burnout someone gets after writing one of these games given the whole game is the writing, and being asked to do it again is wild. Moral of the story is “what could have been” will never leave me, and can we find some billionaires to make a game company that can make a true choose your own adventure where it is 10,000 games in one? I would like that a real lot.
My sibling introduced me to you and you definitely make some of the best background noise a ND person could ask for. You’re very funny and engaging without requiring 100% focus and I would think that’s likely a hard balance to strike. Thank you for filling many a silence and making my life less unbearably long.
It was at around Episode 3 and 4 was where I felt that Telltale's TWD was starting to go downhill for me. Here were my main complaints about S2: * Kenny was brought back, and he was shilled to a ridiculous degree in spite of being a rubbish leader with severe anger issues that can't take criticism. He had also placed Clementine in danger several times, such as planting a stolen radio onto her even if she says no, and forces his group to traverse to Wellington during an upcoming BLIZZARD with no clear destination. His plot was also a repeat of his story in Season 1, and not only has he not learned anything from his experiences, he doubled down with his issues and got more angry and stubborn to the point where he became a threat to his group's lives. By the time he snapped and tried to kill Jane, I was glad to shoot him dead. * Jane is also portrayed as a capable, pragmatic survivor, but ended up being highly incompetent and unnecessarily cruel. Not only does she try to persuade the player to abandon Sarah, she has the nerve to call her a liability, when almost everything Jane does ends up nearly getting herself or Clementine killed. Her plan to hide baby AJ and push the already unstable Kenny over the edge, just to convince Clementine that he's a lost cause, was the stupidest plan ever to have concieved in that moment. Did she not think to just ASK Clementine if she feels safe around Kenny? * The Cabin Group's role abruptly ends during the second half of the season, and then existed only to fill up the death tally. The S1 DLC survivors, except for Bonnie, were only used as cameos and have no role in S2 whatsoever. Carver was also a one-dimensional incompetent thug, and was quickly killed off before we even learned more about the Cabin Group and Carver's history. In the end, their roles amounted to nothing in S2. * The mean-spirited portrayal and death of Sarah was outright disgusting. She's portrayed as a liability that should be left behind to die horribly, nevermind that Kenny, Jane, Luke, Ben, Nick, and several others have done far more harm to the group's survival than a sheltered fifteen-year-old girl with PTSD (confirmed by Telltale) who had just saw her father killed and eaten in front of her (which everyone forgets in Amid the Ruins). Sarah deserved better, since she was far more likable and interesting that most of the characters to me. * Bonnie and Mike's betrayal, and Arvo shooting Clementine, felt railroaded and designed to persuade the player to stay with Kenny and/or Jane, who were both unlikable and were a threat to the group's safety. It felt manipulative and unneccesary, and ends up validating Kenny's highly irrational and overly violent method of leading the group. * Clementine in Season 2 was relied on far too much to do everything for the group, even though she's eleven years-old and everyone around her were adults that should be more than capable. She also wasn't as engaging as a playable character, since the story didn't do more to explore how an eleven-year-old would cope in the zombie apocalypse, and ended up taking the easy way out by portraying her as just as competent as everyone else (sans Sarah, who never got the chance to grow as a character).
On the topic of how Sarah was treated, one thing that really gets my blood boiling is the double standard on how the fanbase and the developers treated Sarah vs how they treat the AJ. On the fanbase side, they keep throwing hate her way for being a liability, saying things like "she was never going to make it" or "you're only delaying the inevitable", or just act all high and mighty about it saying stuff like "if you don't pull your own weight than you deserve to die", but when it comes to the newborn AJ the stuff said about Sarah magically doesn't apply here. On the developer side, they keep shoving it down my throat to leave her to die for being a liablilty/burden, basically treating me like an idiot for wanting to help her out, kill her off 20 minutes later in the most insulting fashion, then in the interview talk about how they hated her and were eager to brutally kill her off. They do all this mean-spirited stuff, and yet they expect me to care about a newborn baby, and said baby is apparently this perfectly well behaved baby with an insane amount of plot armor. So in a struggle to survive a post apocolyptic scenario we can't spend the time to at least try to help a 15 year old sheltered kid be more self-sufficient is impossible you're an idiot for thinking otherwise, but we can totally spend years taking care of a baby. It's apparently so easy that an 11 year old girl can raise a baby by herself..... I'd say that Sarah's treatment (and the Kenny favortism) are what made me lose interest in the series and also made me stop buying a Telltale game altogether.
@@MertKayKay Exactly, I've seen a lot of autistic people identify with her as well & frankly gosh if they were going that angle it's pretty gross. I remember reading a fanfiction where the story explicitly focuses on Clem & Sarah as the main characters that I can share if you want! Think it's a well-done exploration of the material, trims down un-needed characters & keeps Christa in the story, while giving you a much more valid reason to hate the new cast or be angry at them!
Honestly, the relationship of Lee and Clem was the best thing about Telltale's Walking Dead, and Kenny is by far one of the best characters in teh game. But really, the Walking Dead games is stuffed full with all the problems that Telltale has as writers and it's infuriating
Saying that everyone hated it is hyperbole, It's always been my personal favourite. Idk, of course it has problems but so does every piece of media from what I've seen.
"The game wants you to like Kenny." Definitely didn't work in my case. And this season was the main reason I didn't touch the later seasons, it was so so badly written and executed. It might just be because I've been around unstable adults as a kid, but I just could not warm up to Kenny at all. He was unhinged to the point where it was scary and frustrating just to be around him. Jane was the one I sided with every chance I got, she seemed way more sane and safe for Clem by comparison.
How could you like Jane though after what she did in the end? She put AJ in danger just to prove a point about Kenny. Kenny wouldn't have snapped at all if it wasn't for what she did. 💀 Kenny has issues no doubt and you're free to dislike him but he cared about Clem and AJ very much and will do anything to protect them.
@@BlueBlur2003 Yeah, I definitely see your point, Jane absolutely didn't need to push Kenny over the edge like she did. I guess for me the end decision came down to: Kenny snaps big time -> Kenny seems very unstable and scary to be around -> Jane feels like the safer option to go with I'd also spent the whole season bonding with Jane so it didn't make sense to turn on her all of a sudden? The thing I liked about Jane, from the start, was how she didn't let herself be held back by "pack mentality", most of the time, and didn't need to. After playing through Season 1 and some of Season 2, I was getting sick of all the bickering, discord and dysfunctionality in literally every single group Clem was in, and encountering a character who could potentially teach Clem to survive on her own? Seemed pretty good. Not saying my logic was perfect by any means, but that's what I went with at the time :) No hate for Kenny, poor guy had it ROUGH and deserved better, but he just wasn't a good team match for my version of Clem. Right, and some thoughts about the AJ thing at the end: When they (Jane and Clem) retrieved him from the car I think initially I just thought "Oh okay, you stashed him here safely until the situation was resolved, nice." Didn't think it through at the time but now I'm realizing what a shitty thing that was to do. If Jane got herself into a fight with Kenny and died, there was 0 guarantee Clem and Kenny would ever find AJ without her to tell them he was alive and where to find him. Too much of a gamble to make on someone's life. But, at the time I was just thinking "Okay, she left him in a safe place for a few moments" without thinking about it beyond that. Longer reply than was necessary but there's what I can remember about my thought process at the time haha.
I have to say, one thing that really made this season so fun, for me at least, were the teasers that would drop like a week before each episode. The episode 5 teaser genuinely made me emotional upon first watch. I wish they kept that same energy for seasons 3 and 4
I used to be obsessed with the Telltale Walking Dead, it was a big part of my earlier years on the internet. But I apparently don't remember anything about the second season. I remember the opening and the ending but that's it. Which is impressive, I have no idea how it got from point a to point b. This game could have been much better, and I believe it really did get better series wise. But it always felt more like "How does Clem survive without Lee" rather than "How did Lee change Clem" which I felt like isn't a theme explored often in sequels, 'how did the previous events really change the protagonist' is overlooked more often for 'more action and world building' even though most of the time the former is copy and paste from another genre and the latter isn't even that good. Also, for your brother: if he's trying to show us who a character is use still images rather than labeling the name over a video playing of the characters. About a fourth of the way in the video the name Becca shows up and kinda just floats around and its hard to see who it's applied to.
Hey Froggie! Thanks for the feedback for Smooth, I'll deliver it to him. And thank you for watching! I really love the later episodes (I think Season 4 is an awesome piece of work). I love that you remember the opening and ending of it and nothing in between; I have to say I agree. I think this episode is so without stakes that there's no real peaks and troughs to observe and remember at all
FINALLY SOMEONE WHO KNOWS AND HEARD CHRISTA DIE. NO ONE ELSE REALISES IT BUT I HEARD IT TOO. EVERYONE THINKS SHES MISSING BUT I HEARD THEM LITERALLY SHOOT HER
I'm glad so many of us are on the same page of "Season 3 was objectively the *worst* season." Because oh lord that game was so boring and forgettable it made me actively forget it happened. You could just remove the 3rd season and literally nothing changes. Honestly Season 2 gets a lot more love because it gave us a bunch of interesting characters (still a firm believer that Luke's death was 100% unneeded/Christa not having a conclusive fate was annoying), plus the fanfic/fanart side of the community really made works based around seasons 1, 2 and 4 more than 3... _god it was such a bad season-_ Also, Jane was... a mixed bag for me and still is. I get her point that she knew years of trauma was weighing on Kenny but her idea of faking AJ's death to prove it was the absolute worst way of going about it and every playthrough I've done I just let her die or abandon her because of it. Like, girlie I don't know what you thought faking the death of a newborn infant was going to do to the man who took him in as his own and who's lost his entire family but go off I guess? Also Kenny isn't an angel too and I wish people would acknowledge he's been fucking up since the start of the season (like blaming Clem for Sarita's death) and overall his general attitude within the group, and that's coming from THE #1 Kenny the Dolphin Hunter fan. But I do understand the criticisms.
I loved Luke and hated what they did to him. It made more sense for it to be Luke vs Kenny. Yes I know that Luke wouldn't have pulled what Jane did but I feel like the fight between Luke and Kenny would've been about something like Luke trying to talk to Kenny about him being unstable. I never forgave Rebecca for essentially telling an 11 year old child that they found alone to go die and I was mean to her every chance we got apart from when Alvin asked for the food since I actually liked Alvin. Also Jane as a character never really made sense and I hold the opinion that she could've easily been replaced by Molly from season 1. We could've met her at the Ski lodge with Kenny using the explanation that she saved him back in season 1 which makes more sense than Kenny just getting lucky. Or she could've tagged along with Clementine, Christa, and Omid and then we meet back up with her at Carver's where she could give us closure on Christa. Heck all the stealth missions that Clem had like stealing the walkie talkies and turning on the speakers could've been done by Molly and we could've played as her for those bits which makes more sense than everyone constantly putting missions on the 11 year old. Both Molly and Luke could've been the new mentor figures for the season. Molly and Clem could've easily had that sisterly bond and even Sarah since I could totally see her teaching both Clem and Sarah some of her moves. We could still have the part of her and Luke and her getting pregnant I feel would have a bigger impact than with Jane since Molly definitely has some trauma from Crawford not wanting kids. Unlike Jane, Molly was pretty damn smart like when she used the bells to lure the walkers.
Wow, you pretty much articulated my own thoughts about the illusion of choice in these games. The first season looks like it gives you lots of choice the first time around, and even after that it feels different on subsequent playthroughs due to the ways you interact with the characters. Season Two just... lets you reach the same outcome with four different buttons.
Know I'm late to this, but I wanna throw my two cents into this.... can we all agree Jane is horrible? Like, I understand what she was meant to be - I can understand what they were going for, but my God, they fumbled the bag with the final episode and beyond with her. She's very much an evil character who pushes Kenny to the edge for the sake of... wanting to show who he truly is? And we know who Kenny is, he's a troubled character, he's not a perfect character, he's a man who's lost everything time and time again, and Jane tricks him into thinking one of the reasons to live died. Heck when you do shoot him, you get the chance to talk to him, and he apologizes, saying why... and it's heartbreaking. Or a joke, if you look at Two Best Friends Play playthrough where they just laugh and joke about it... they sided with Jane just to spite Kenny. But regardless, regardless, Jane then expects Clem to smile and go "oh, you - oh you clever shrew!" when A.J is alive. And if you choose to stay with her? She commits suicide, dooming Clem and A.J if they were solely reliant on her because her dumbass decided unprotected sex is worth it when our group is endanger! (Good one Luke) or if you choose to abandon her, she performs a "I can't do this alone ;-; Clem I need you!" - then likely commits suicide anyway because of pregnency because dumbass of the year can't trick people good enough, and can't face the consequances of her actions! Seriously, if Jane and Luke were around, maybe Sarah could have lived longer! Maybe there wouldn't be as much panic, but no, Jane fucks. Leaves. Comes back. Become Darth Sidious/Palpatine and going, "He's going to hurt everyone Clem...", "Use my power, I beg you!" - "Unlimited Unprotected SEX!" - "Execute Order; Provoke the Man" What does Kenny do if you seperate from him? He's.... he's understanding. He just - the moment he heards A.J cry, he says it'll be okay. That Clementine has him. She'll always have him. He doesn't do anything else... at Wellington, it's the same, he almost sacrifices his spot for them. And goes into the distance, by himself, but happily knowing they'll be safe... until Season 3 and "wow look Clem's here, Wellington got attacked lmao" Kenny does die due to B.S if you stay with him, I am still mad at a car crash. A car crash killed Kenny from the Walking Dead?! Which is why whenever I do play Season 2, always make sure Kenny blesses us now. I don't know what happens to him, but by god, I know he's okay.
Hi, year late. I cannot tell you how frustrating it was when they wouldn't let me say "HE JUST BARGED IN, WTF WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO? I'M FIFTY POUNDS SOAKING WET!!!" Thank you for bringing that up.
30:13 "Jane is overall a better carer for clementine" Jane suicides and leaves Clem alone. Kenny sacrafices himself and dies for Clem even though it's her fault that she crashed. Yea, of course. "A better carer". Besides it was never stated that Kenny was an abusive father to Clem during their time together after the 2nd season. There were no flashbacks about it, but there were about how Kenny motivated her and cared about her. Kenny killed Carver (Guy who killed dozens) and beat up Arvo (Guy who killed Luke and could killed the whole Clem's group.) and Jane. Jane stated that she couldn't save Kenny's baby. If you tell somebody that it's because of you their child died even in these peaceful times they will most likely kill you or beat you almost to death. Kenny, on the other hand, is a very damaged and broken person who's kid died once. Of course for him it would be even worse than for your average Joe. Why would Jane do that? Besides, Jane grabbed a knife, she could've used some other non lethal weapon. Jane is just a massive L choice.
i should definitely replay this season, as it is my favorite, and i adore clementine as a protagonist, ESPECIALLY since she was so young. playing as a kid in an end-of-the-world scenario is so interesting and i kinda wished they expanded upon it more
I’ve never really noticed all these things… I think I’ve always just been blinded by how much I love Clementine. I like this video but there are some things off. As in like… nuances. Larry doesn’t immediately hate Lee because he’s black (it probably doesn’t help though), he immediately hates him because he’s a convicted murderer.
Larry wasn't racist and he didn't dislike Lee because he was black. It was because he knew Lee was arrested/convicted for murder (a Senstor at that) thus felt he was a danger to the group.
I thought S2 was a mixed bag, I'm shocked to hear someone say the game wants you to side with Kenny because I never wanted to, I loved and missed him sure, but he was clearly dangerous, by the end he didn't even feel like the same character anymore so shooting him was a lot easier than the writers probably thought. The true dumpster fire was A New Frontier, IMO.
The kenny endings was 10x more satisfying than the Jane ones so yeah the writers clearly had a preference. That being said I think they went a bit overboard sometimes when showing his irrational tendencies.
I think Innuendo studio's take is great. Where Kenny us effectively framed as an abusive stepfather. Someone you sympathize with and care for deeply, but who's actions are ultimately unforgivable. To me the most satisfying endng was killing kenny and then leaving Jane. Maybe it's unrealistic, but it felt more narratively satisfying. After all, Clem had already demonstrated greater emotional maturity than either of them. I loved Kenny but it was clear he was gone. And once the post-traumatic outbursts become properly violent, that's when they need to be stopped.
I think this type of "choose your own adventure" genre was a product of its time. It wasn't dynamic enough to provide realistic changes in the story be it due to development time or poor writing, and the feeling of group aggression felt artificial and forced. Its sad because i don't think it had to be this way and despite kinda liking this game for me it goes down from here in other other two games in different ways. I recommend checking out "The Wolf Among us" i think its approach to balancing being a murderous sociopath vs basic humanity and how people treat you carries over better in that game then these ones.
@@TheBlueLink3 TWD Season 1 felt more sophisticated and meaningful in its writing, concerning gameplay and the decisions, Until Dawn blows them out of the water. Not that it's perfect, but a lot cooler than what Telltale did.
@@TheBlueLink3 Maybe you're right, there are a lot of setpieces and scenarios you will reach in Until Dawn regardless of the decisions made along the way, but in general there are a lot more differences, be it in endings, small details, surviving characters etc. TWD becomes very disappointing in that regard on a second playthrough, especially when the game actively ignores your decisions and chosen dialogue options.
I’ve always loved how everyone gets different feelings and likes different characters in this series. Personally, I sided with Kenny most of the time. He is very useful and protective, that and my own nostalgia, not unlike Clem would have. The main issue with him is that he has no Lee, no one that would stand up to him and punch him in the face when he needed it, then have his back when he deserves it. Luke could only do the former, while Lee could do both. I always felt the final fight should’ve been Luke Vs. Kenny. It doesn’t fit Jane’s character and I personally didn’t like her enough by that time to save her over Kenny. Luke and Kenny already had a rivalry going for them while Kenny and Jane were just prickly with each other. A simple bad situation could’ve been enough to set Kenny and Luke against each other. I feel it would’ve been more in place for there to be several endings for Luke, Kenny, and Jane. You could slip away with Jane and the baby, let Kenny kill Luke while Jane leaves, kill Kenny to save Luke, and also an ending where Jane and Luke stay with Clem and AJ, in a familial group, since Jane and Luke already had a fling. The choice would’ve been much harder for most, for me it would’ve been anyway. As for everything else, this season was far more of a hit or miss for me than any other telltale game. There was things I liked, such as seeing the return of smaller characters such as the 400 days crew, and I really liked some of the new characters, but then there is the weak as hell overarching villain, the contrived writing, and the fact most of the story is pointless because of season 3. Sorry I know I’m super late and this was a long ramble but I just wanted to put my thoughts out there, great video. Also, congrats on having Wendigoon as a viewer!
I had a thought and has to come back here to get on a soap box. Luke's death is so terrible. Not because 'he was the only one nice to us and we can't save him', but because the makers of the game thought it smart to insert their tough-girl-sona to stand there the whole time and tell you, "Nah, you can't save him." As though we hadn't already learned that you can't save ANYBODY in these games. That's not a compliment on the futileness of survival, but instead an infuriating reminder that these games pretend your choices matter when they don't. I've seen CYOA books with a broader diversity of outcomes. It's not, "You can't save him", it's, "You can't save anyone, so stop trying because you're just wasting gameplay time." And I bet the writers thought it was soooo deep to have a strong and independent woman talk directly to the player, reminding them "This is a really, REALLY serious situation and people are going to DIE because that's REAL LIFE." Yeesh, when did zombie games get so pretentious?
From my understanding, the original plan was to pit Luke and Kenny against each other and grow that until the finale where you have to choose between them. However, due to weird fan shipping going on between Clem and Luke, Jane was brought back in Episode 5 (after she left in 4) and was then reworked into growing conflict with Kenny in the final episode. I'd easily side with Luke or Jane against Kenny either way, but it's definitely annoying to see the seeds sewn in Episode 2-4 in regards to a Luke/Kenny feud just to have it undercut forcing Jane to stand-in.
Season 2 certainly did have a lot of problems, I think if it had more time in develoupment and if the workplace hadn't been so toxic it could have been great. I still like most of the characters and wish they'd gotten a better story. Sarah's death was the death that actually made me mad at the game. While the themes you talked about are probably true, that's not what I got out of this game. The theme I got was 'You can't go back' Basically, Clem wants to be around people. She wants a family like she had with her parents, like she had with Lee, but people are the real danger in this zombie apocolypse. If not from malice like Carver's, from selfishness like Jane's, or stubbornness like Kenny's, or petty bullshit like Bonnie's. For all of Jane's crap she did have one thing right. She talked about other people dragging Clementine down. In the end, I felt the game was saying that Clememtine was better off alone. (which is the ending I got when I shot Kenny and left Jane on the side of the road like the trash she is) Which sucks, but the whole world sucks. I do think you're wrong about Kenny and Jane. Kenny is a dick and we see him disreguard the opinions/feelings of Katja and Marita in S1 and S2 but never in either game that I can recall (Or the brief glims of him from S3) do we ever see him intentionally laying hands on any of his loved ones. Not Duck, or any of them. Not that his and Clem's relationship would be 100% healthy but I genuinely don't see evidence of him becoming physically abusive. And, in my opinion, kicking the shit out of Arvo doesn't count towards that. Arvo was a piece of crap. Even if you don't steal from him he still brings his people to rob and probably kill the group. That's not to say Kenny was right hurting Arvo, but there's a huge difference between hurting someone in the group and hurting someone who tried to hurt you. The game also tries to connect Kenny and Carver. Mike and Bonnie pretending that stealing all the groups supplies and running away was to get away from Kenny. Like he's as bad as Carver. But Kenny doesn't try to keep people with him. If he survives the fight with Jane and you tell him he's dangerous, he tries to send Clem and AJ away for their own saftey. If you reach Wellington, he prioritizes Clem and AJ's saftey and happiness over his own. Carver would NEVER do that. And neither would Jane. As for Jane, you like to contribute some of her actions to writing decisions and while that's totally valid, that's not how I like to think of it. While there is a lot Jane could teach Clementine, she's a legitimately bad person imo. Jane's defining characteristic is her selfishness. It presents itself as self preservation most of the time but then she meets Clem. She attaches to Clem and wants Clem with her. So she contrives a scenario to get rid of the only person Clem has left. She puts a literal newborns life in danger with the express purpose of MAKING Clem kill Kenny. At any time she could have stopped the fight by telling the truth, but she didn't. The only reason I can think of is that she wanted Clem to kill Kenny. And honestly? I don't even think she indended to tell Clem about AJ. It wasn't until you hear AJ screaming that the truth comes out. And if we're being honest, if AJ was a real baby he would probably be dying. Jane is a manipulative, selfish person. This isn't me intending to bash your video though, it's definitly well made and your points are certainly valid. :)
I absolutely HATE how the game tries to force you to like and sympathize with Kenny. I may be biased, since I hated him since episode 2 of season 1, but I think that in games like these it’s important to let the player make their own moral judgments of the characters and act upon them. It’s really unfair to present the player with what is supposed to be a morally gray, polarizing choice that ideally should be split 50/50, only to punish the player by giving them this terrible cobbled together ending made with purely reused assets if you choose to save Jane, meanwhile rewarding players for playing the way the devs wanted you to by having a fully fleshed out, narratively satisfying ending if you let Kenny MURDER SOMEONE. I would easily compare it to how LiS1’s ending is handled. You shouldn’t give your player an underwhelming, unsatisfying ending just because they chose an option you presented to them.
34:28 Larry isn’t necessarily racist, he’s just an asshole. He hates Lee because he knows he’s a murderer and therefore doesn’t trust him. He’s not exclusively nasty towards Lee though, he’s a dick to everyone. He never calls out Lee in any way based on race (unlike a character such as Nate in the 400 Days DLC who immediately asks Russell if he’s in a gang after meeting him). #Justice4Larry
I don’t think ‘everyone hated’ this season at all I think it was very much liked and fairly criticised. I think the one that should be given the everyone hated titles would be season 3 cos that was widely disliked
It's so weird! Everyone I've spoken to about this season has hated it - to the point where I felt confident enough to name this video the title I did - but then I post it and loads of people really like it! Really rethinking my name now haha, it's not too late
@@MertKayKay hahaha I’ve only seen somewhat mild criticism and positivity about it although like you said at the beginning a lot of the criticism is with the writing and characters, and also due to lack of consequences with your choices. Super exited for the rest of the vid!
@@MertKayKay I think a part of the common view of season 2 is in part due to season 3 being so much worse and nostalgia. Nostalgia can make you forget the bad stuff
Season 2 actually tries to be lightly realistic for a post-apocalyptic zombie story and idiots who want every story to be a teen drama, say that "muh to many ppl died". Cmon👎
The writing for Sarah frustrates me because I can see what they were trying to do with her and how she could've been a really interesting character Serah was ment to show what Clem could've become if Lee didn't have that talk with Chuck and didn't teach her how to survive even without him, if Carlos did the same with Serah she might have been able to survive. It's a really interesting parallel but what frustrates me is instead of focusing on it, the game treats Sarah like she's the Meg Griffin of The Walking Dead, constantly shitting on her even though she's literally a kid to the point that no matter what choices you make, Sarah will die in a really brutal way. The fact that apparently in a interview with the writers they revealed how much they disliked Sarah to the point where they were happy that she was killed off is really messed up and just sad Just the amount of wasted potential with her frustrates me, like imagine if Jane were to die instead of Sarah at the museum's observation if you chose not to leave her behind, like imagine that she's the one that hid AJ from Kenny in fear that he might hurt him. The amount of untapped potential thrown out the window just so they could make her a walking punching bag
Fr I straight up wanted to throw hands with Jane every time she fought me on any of my decisions. I like to preserve life on any of my choose-your-own-adventure games like this. I didn't like how Kenny would attempt to use his past memories against you but my God hearing Jane open her mouth about anything had me siding with him whenever they would argue. By far the worst was the RV scene. I'm autistic and really related to Sarah; so I immediately recognized she was having a panic attack. I went down and applied anything I could use to get her out of it and to safety. Yet every time I felt as if I was getting somewhere that bitch would open her mouth and set my progress back tremendously. I wanted to sacrifice her so bad lol. The cherry-on-top was the museum balcony scene; wear I'm trying to secure the spot from walkers and she becomes trapped. I thought we were going to get a Molly character development scene where she would step up and, well, do something but she didn't. It was like watching a child, who knew there was a now or never ultimatum, then deliberately choosing to act malicious just to have an excuse to claim inaction. At that point whenever I could afterwards I wanted to have her killed. It left a bad taste in my mouth having to pick between her and Kenny; knowing I'd be picking my own poison. And the only ending that felt satisfying was to kill Jane and have Kenny drop Clementine and AJ off at Wellington; an actual safe-haven at the time. People love hating on season 3 but season 2 is (my personal) worst by far.
I feel Sarah is heavily autistic coded. So the way the writers treated her and branded her a burden really sucks. She has the signs for it, and even her reactions to stress expresses it. Carlos practically confirms it too with his dialogue at the beginning.
Season 2 really feels like Abuse Apologia: The Game at times with its characterization and insistence upon you ignoring horrible patterns of behavior as Clem. Like you pointed out, Kenny gets viewed through rose-colored lenses despite the fact that he constantly shows signs of an abuser. What makes it insidious is how the game seems to want you to take the position of "...but he would never be like that to ME" as if that's ok or remotely reasonable to believe.
Before i watch this video i have to say i fucking love this Season even with all it's flaws. It's unfinished and could have been better if they had more time but i can't help but enjoy it. The atmosphere, the dark tone, the great music, i really like the cabin crew especially Nick and Luke. All the emotional moments work for me and idk i just fuck wit the vibe. Coincidentally my friend and I are actually doing our own retrospective debate about the entire series on my other channel Christian Cryers, won't be out for a bit but if you wanna see me explain myself then go check out the channel. Sorry this wasn't meant to be a promo but TLDR i love Season 2 and all the legitimate criticisms probably won't change my mind even though it's fair to not like it.
If it helps, I definitely think that all the issues I had with this game came down completely to their budget/resource issue, which I do talk about in this video :D So not necessarily the game itself, but more as a symptom of bad management.
I cant wait for your take one season 3 and 4!!!! I actually quite liked Sarah and wish they did more with her, like how duck and clem had a few moments together... I remember in the season 1 you saw clem and duck draw together, and the dialogue of clem putting a bug on ducks pillow always makes me laugh. They could've made Clem and Sarah talk about stuff, maybe take pictures because Sarah really liked doing that. They definitely missed an oppurtunity there and they made clem feel too grownup like. I get she is hardened from all that shes been through but they could've kept her love for drawing.I dont think they ever made her draw after the 1st game.
You made some very good points. TBH if it wasn't for Kenny I wouldn't have liked this season that much since I never cared for the cabin group (Nick, Sarah, Carlos). It's a shame that Mike, Bonnie, Arvo, and the 400 days cast were thrown into the forgotten characters list.
To be honest I feel like most of the conflict with Kenny in season two is so contrived just for the sake of building up tension and you can obviously tell that the original plan was to have Luke be the one to fight Kenny in episode five especially with the foreshadowing in episode two. Swapping him out for Jane was just a bad idea especially since for me she’s an annoying asshole. I distinctly remember on my first Playthrough when she was whining in the car I was like “Ok bitch you are dying the first chance I get”. I know they’re an absolute piece of shit character can work but season two doesn’t realise how much of a piece of shit she is. Say what you will about Chloe in life is strange but the story is aware that she can be a piece of shit at times and gives her justifiable reasons for being that way.
if I'd had to choose between Luke and Kenny I would have been panicking while THAT timer ran out. xD seriously, and we'd just met Jane a couple of episodes before. give me the gutpunch of the unstable but beloved parental figure vs. your best friend who is trying his best.
"Hated by everyone" is a bit of a wishful thinking, but yeah, I see where you're coming from. I remember playing it at launch and quite liking it, but around episode 4 I had an unpleasant realisation: This series became totally affected by the curse of the original graphic novel - it's just a bunch of meandering survival for survival sake without any strong thematic hook now. Season one wasn't like that at all. And season 4 is not like that too, thankfuly.
I feel the better theme for this season would be about how kids reflect on things, Clementine reflecting the need for survival and as a child, the need for others. Sarah is the opposite of that and the consequences for it. and AJ being a blank canvas I feel an interesting Idea that they could've made with Sarah was that if you helped her and were honest she would have gone back to clementine in the scene with Jane and Kenny knocking one of them out with something
I’ve always loved season 2 as my absolute favorite. It’s the first time we can truly control Clem and shape her story. A new frontier was riddled with missing content and suffered for not including clementine right from the start.
@@MertKayKay at first I didn’t like a new frontier but now looking back years later I’ve grown to like it. I always shot Conrad originally but after choosing to spare him the whole story basically changed and gabe was more tolerable. I just feel like ANF had so much more potential
Larry was racist? I kinda thought he treated Lee like that cuz he knew he killed someone before the zombies and kinda why he doesn't act like that with Clementine and even wanting to protect Clementine along with his daughter
Yea, she pulled that part out of her ass. She acted like he called Lee a slur. If she wanted something to say about Larry it would be about the "Homo Parade" line, but he never called Lee anything other than saying that he knew that Lee was a convicted murder. They always gotta make it about race
Wait I thought season 2 was universally loved. I've only ever heard good things about it. It's where we saw the rise of badass Clementine. It was season 3 that got panned everywhere I looked.
Hey all! My brother edited this video for me and it was really nice for us to work together on a project. If you have any feedback for him, please drop it here and I'll make sure he sees it :D
Thanks Smooth! The editing was really good. You guys share a good sense of humor.
What is your brothers contacts. I want to give him money if I ever start making videos again. My ADHD brain won’t let me figure out how to edit!
@@ChuggleDBuglGames If you ever need an editor, shoot me an email (address is in the about section of my channel) and I'm sure he'll always be down to help :D
Great editing! It was smooth (pun intended) and nicely timed with your jokes!
It was kind of him to do this for you after all those years of letting him wipe his nose on you. We stan
I'm just absolutely disgusted at how the writers treated Sara. Like, there were a million ways to write her out without taking glee in...punishing a child for being a child, and not even really being a liability
It's like they turned into the audience who cheered for Duck's death
Yeah, especially as she was neurodivergent coded! It really made me feel like complete crap as someone who would more likely be like Sarah than Clem (or more likely a mix of the two) if there was an apocalypse. But I still haven’t played S3 and still think S3 is worse just from what I’ve heard. It’s 2.99 on steam now so I might finally buy it.
Sarah had more right to be the way she is than Ben did. Ben was an adult, a naive and stupid young adult, but still an adult, and made more fuck ups than any character in the series and was given chance after chance to step up and be better, and he never did. The only thing he did right was sacrifice himself at the bell tower, which I dropped him every time.
@@LethalByChoice I wouldn't exactly call Ben an adult, but he still could've been more liable for his age even if he was very young. Like when he abandoned Clem when they were surrounded by walkers. I understand being scared, but that never should have happened where he just runs away and leaves someone to die like that.
It was definitely a sadistic treatment of mentally disabled, mentally delayed person. Like she's clearly untaught and they do everything in their power to make a child being a child their fault for dying.
This had to be the most insane episode of all of the games since way to many situations involved these grown adults looking to a child for help or input. A group full of grown people going "what should we do 11 year old!?"
Couldn't agree more! The second Luke was like "they're not going to shoot a kid" I was like... what the hell man
Yeah, but thats one of the main problems with S2, you’re the protagonist who’s a child. If the protagonist can’t be the protagonist in their story, it would just be a boring story. So it looks like they go to a child for answers. Which is why S2 you should’ve played an adult.
"Clem, fix the windmills!"
@@PostCrisisRH They could've easily worked around that. They could have strong adult characters, but have Clem be guided and also pick up tactical skills from them on her own throughout the story
@@Xxdominater In a telltale game the protagonist is always front and center, if they had competent adults, Clem wouldn’t really do anything besides learn and do a few things, which is why I suggest to play as an adult instead of Clementine, as an Adult you have more say, more power, and actually can effect Clementine until the end, like S1.
I hated the fact that even if you don't steal Arvo's medicine he still ambushes you then the next episode her sister dies and also everyone of his goons but Mike and Bonnie treat him like a good person because their ambush flopped. Like they lost their memory of that said ambush that almost killed the baby that they were protecting in the first place. There should be a choice to cap Arvo when you reach his hideout where his supplies are.
Yes! If you play compassionately and treat Arvo with respect at every opportunity he'll still wig out and attack you. I was so confused on my first playthrough
@@MertKayKay i mean you only makes decision for yourself, not Arvo. So your choices matters for you atleast.
@@MertKayKayAfter season 1 where Clem got taken from the guy that acts up whether you personally took from the car or not, I stopped caring about taking from people cause I just know they’re gonna come back anyway 😭🤣 might as well have the pills, y’know?
@@wifflewaffle5006 in season 1s case it get stolen regardless, in season 2 unless i misremember, you dont rob arvo if you dont rob him
@@GizzorYou don’t steal the medicine but Jane still steals his gun and threatens him
It's amazing how many odd interactions/poorly written situations could have been avoided if they just let Clementine be 15-16 in this game. All of a sudden it makes more sense why you'd send her out to do recon, do dangerous tasks, or even attempt to settle disputes. You wouldn't have a wildly over-mature child anymore, you'd just have a teen who grew up during the apocalypse, and as such knows how to do a lot of random survival shit. It would make finding anyone she knew before (like Kenny) a much more complex and emotional problem about dredging up a past she loved as a kid but could now see the cracks in through the eyes of an adult, vs a "Do I abandon my new friends or my old friends?"
I agree! It's like an adult world through a weird adult lens but also childish problems and childish solutions?
The one reason that I could think of for why they didn't make clem a teen was maybe because of the massive time jump, clem's personality would be wildly different since people changes after a certain amount of time and making the time jump shorter could still give the impression that clem has grown but she would still somewhat resemble her s1 counterpart and would still be familiar to returning players
Because if they did it would fuck up the timeline for S3, and they wanted to make a story about a little girl growing up alone in the apocalypse, a reverse situation of Rick and Carl from the comic series.
Why Clementine is basically doing all this work is because you’re the protagonist and as the protagonist you can not not do anything (if that makes sense lol), if the game was on par with S1 with writing and you played Clem you’d barely do anything in the story, which would be boring. To fix this you should’ve played an adult instead of Clementine (Until the end at least), it keeps the aspect of her growing up in an apocalypse but doesn’t force age her up to make the story entirely different and make Clem a generic survivor.
No, thank you. Would have preferred having to play as someone else this season, but still having Clementine young so I can see her grow. That’s what got me into her story. Would have been weird to see her be 16 all of a sudden. Wouldn’t have been attached to her as I am.
Nah, Clem needed to be 11 here
Honestly, I absolutely loved season 2. It's always been "the new frontier"/season 3 that I absolutely hated. Looking back now, I can understand the criticism that season 2 gets, but I just could not get myself to care about the characters in season 3.
Very interesting! I feel a lot of people usually have either season 2 or 3 as their least favourite. I definitely preferred 3 to 2 but I completely agree that it was super limited in... basically every way. Thank you for watching Chris
same, i think i’m a bit biased to season 2 since it’s when we first got to play as clementine and she’s one of my favorite video game protagonists.
Literally!! I understand the criticism but it's still my favorite season. 😭😭
Me too. I thought season 2 was ok, but that’s it. Just ok. Season 3 made me want to bash my head into the wall. I couldn’t stand any of the characters except for Clementine.
I agree with this! Season 2 is tied with Season 4 as my favorite game in the series!
I was so disappointed with Sarah, I thought she’d be my Clementine when I first met her, that was the death that truly broke me. She died the way she most feared no matter what I did, and it was awful.
If you want a better story for Sarah I highly recommend you search up the series "What if Lee survived" by the channel "Lightro DLC". He does a full series "what if" and rewrites the story with Lee and he has Sarah not only survive but really grow into her own as well. Definitely look it up.
@@billygrantham5380 I like that, I’m gonna go check that out
@@bookbook9495 It should be the first result if you search "What if Lee survived". The whole story is so good.
young me thought she was so annoying, held the grp back on multiple life threatening occasions, years later im seeing that sarah was probably autistic and her being so encouraged carlos to keep her sheltered and close which is wrong, i feel like carlos may have had a neglectful past due to this.
Same with ben, i actually hated him more than sarah because he left clementine cornered , years later realising hes just a very realistic character and if an apocalypse was to ever happen, the majority of us would be like ben😭
@@teevee7678 exactly- I was raised with a lot of autistic friends, so Sarah was very familiar to me. Her father felt like he was actively trying to get her killed the way he behaved with her.
Then, there’s Ben. He had just lost his teacher and his classmate. He saw them die horribly- of course he’s a bit timid. He’s a dumbass, because we all are.
Actually I think more people hated season 3. Clem was barely playable there except in the flashbacks. Thanks to season 3 everyone looks back on season 2 more fondly. Anyway I heard the final fight was supposed to be between Luke and Kenny but Telltale killed Luke off so they needed to use Jane as a last minute replacement. Sarah was just disappointing mostly b/c they plastered her on the promo art right beside Clem and did nothing with her. On the bright side Telltale wanted to kill Clem off in a snow storm this season but changed their minds.
idky, ANF is overhated.
@@realestsienna Well you are in the minority here based on the amount of likes.
Gosh imagine if she’d been done in by a snow storm of all things, that would’ve sucked
@@realestsienna I agree but I also like all the seasons so Im biased lol
@@realestsienna it's definitely overhated but still the worst season. there are good things about it, but compared to season one and even the other seasons (to some degree) it's a bit lackluster imo.
On Sarah I remember an interview with some of, I think, the writers in which they talked about how much they hated her and how happy they were to finally kill her off, laughing about it the whole time.
It got a lot of backlash bc people were rightfully disgusted over this treatment towards a child that was clearly written as mentally ill, she definitely had an anxiety disorder at least.
So yes the developers did legitimately hate her and used her as their punching bag up until they were able to kill her which is why she dies no matter what, made even worse by the fact that if you do try to save her at every turn she dies while having a serious panic attack. I remember feeling sick to my stomach when I played through that. It was very telling of the devs' views on mental illness.
Calm yourself. It's just a game. She's also pathetic and weak. Weak people do not deserve to live in that type of world. It is the truth. Be strong and survive or be eaten. The End. There is no in between.
Or it’s just a realistic depiction of what having a disadvantage like a mental illness would bring you in a world like The Walking Dead.
It’s just a simple fact that it’s a hardcore world that even the best die in. A sheltered child with a severe anxiety disorder that freezes and shuts down when stressed would just not make it in such a world. It’s the Jane’s that make it. The people who don’t give a fuck about others and are legit pretty terrible. Sarah dies no matter what because she *would* die no matter what.
@@princeytron Well I guess it's a blesssing that useless Jane died then
@@princeytron LOL the janes make it? buddy jane hung herself at the first sign of a baby. she didn't even go out to look for no plan B she just took the test and tied up a rope 🤣if anything, its the kennys & carvers that will make it. you're fucking delusional.
frankly i think any complaints about sarah being handled how she was are coming from a place of insecure projection, in the real world? in a situation like this? Sarah isn't going to make it. its a miracle she was even there at the cabin 2 years in with how dumb carlos was. his refusal to teach his daughter how the world had changed was her downfall. its tragic, and not her fault. Clementine survived because she was hardened and adapted quickly in a cruel world, thankfully what lee taught her managed to put her in the position she landed in. Sarah's lack of experience & refusal to learn landed her exactly where she ends up. I think it makes total sense. Her death in the trailer park is upsetting because its powerful.
though i will say: if telltale where actually serious about "Choices mattering" they would have given us a way to ultimately make her determinate. teaching her to use a gun is so pointless making her determinant in the trailer park is super silly. i think having her death be an unavoidable situation due to the set of circumstances she was delt is a much more powerful way for the character to go. Slapping her to her senses is satisfying because you get the idea that she might come to understand and live but ultimately it amounts to nothing. that part i can understand being criticized - its just poor writing but frankly the mass majority of the fourth episode is a dumpster fire in the writing department so sarahs character being handled poorly is at the very bottom of my list of issues. Nick comes to mind before she does, man is so utterly pointless its actually insane.
I was going to ask if you’d be willing to cover season 2 as I really loved your first video. I’m very excited to watch and this is also my formal request for you to cover seasons 3 & 4. Also, I find season 2 to be the one that stands out in my memory and Kenny to be one of the most interesting adaptations of a character I used to love. I suppose season 2 was unique in a way I rarely see (Atleast Kenny was, I hated nearly every other aspect of the story lol). Keep up the great content!
Oh damn hey
Wendigoon, the fact that you watch my videos is actually immensely flattering, thank you! I definitely will be covering the rest of them asap.
Moreover, I watched your video on the Mandela Catalogue the other day and I very nearly had to sleep with the light on. And the Rockefeller bloke who had a nasty run-in with cannibals (or so it seemed). Thanks for making amazing stuff :D
well this was wholesome
I've always wondered if you'd played the game after your walking dead iceberg always would've loved for you to do one for the games
I just wish they knew what they really wanted to do with Kenny; in early concepts he was supposed to be the villain of Season 2 and it shows at times, but at the same time they want to make him the second protagonist again and make you like him. They tried to make this weird balance between him being an uncontrollable asshole and a loving uncle but it worked at best 50% of the time... Which was still enough to make him the best character in this season... And that says quite a lot about the other characters.
Lee must be the most incredibly written protagonist, because all the way through S2 I was constantly wishing that he was still alive. And then getting genuinely sad when once again accepting that he wasn't. The amount of loss evoked from a fictional character- in me, at least- is really incredible.
Yep, I STILL miss Lee to this day.
It also helps all the grown ups are incompetent idiots who constanly blow up at a 11 year old gir in season 2.
One thing that really bothers me about season 2 is some of the characters have no idea what they're doing for example: Carlos claims to be a doctor but for some reason when he saw the bite on clementine's arm, he couldn't even tell if it was a walker bite or a dog bite and for that he locks clem in a shed where she had to fight for her life.
p.s: I killed bonnie because she's a snake and you know what they say "Kill the snake before it bites."
Yes that's so true! Walkers with human teeth versus sharp dog teeth? Different sized mouths, plus she'd probably stink of dog too. That really bothered me as well
I know its late but I saw a theory that Carlos wasnt actually a doctor and only pretended because being a doctor in the post apocalypse make people more likely to protect you. There's not much actually pointing to it other than him being medically incompetent but its a headcanon I tend to go with.
@@eva1585that would make sense with how everyone needs to learn basic medicine to survive. Even in this season clementine had to stitch up her own arm as an 11 year old. Give a man enough time and he can pretend his way enough until a real doctor shows up to call him out.
Carlos notr recognising the bite could be excused if we asume it was REALLY bad. What really did me is the fact that he claimed that fever would show if Clem was bitten or not, as if pain or most other infections can't cause that.
@@eva1585the rest of the cabin group should’ve figured that out
It would have been a much more compelling story had they kept Christa around to try and raise Clem. They could have had her cold off put demeanor towards Clem as an interesting storytelling point to contrast to the warmth and comfort Lee (presumingly the headcanon the writers preferred) had provided for Clem, giving a good jumping-off point for Clem to become hardened and to maybe drive a better selling point why she might want to join up the new group despite their less than stellar welcome. Or perhaps just have Christa and Clem band together and then have Kenny come in to offer a place with him instead, still doing the Blood v.s Water thing but with two characters we actually would know and root for (for different reasons)
I have no idea why Christa never showed up again in the series.
@@liamphibia had to retcon her, but she actually dies in the first act if you try to distract the plebs to get her to run away
@@johnanderson3559 it has never been said that she dies and hearing a gunshot does not prove that she's dead especially in this universe
that would have been the worst and they re would have been completly no point in doing this as it would just be a copy of season 1 but with Christa ?? I mean don t like the season if you want but at least it showed how Clem grew up and how she was affected by the apocalypse and Lee.
@@liamphibia I think it would have been much more interesting if Christa took Lilly's place in The Final Season.
Really loved your point on the "marked for death" halo placed on characters. It's a real shame that Telltale did not put more resources into their characters, if they truly did intend for your decisions to matter, especially decisions that were life or death for these characters, then why let their lives drag on while they're waiting for death that's inevitable.
I'm pretty sure ANF is the one everybody really hates. S2 is usually considered just decent, which I basically agree with
Nah. I like ANF. Think it is the best season overall
I agree, season 3 was terrible, it's made me hesitant to start season 4. S3 introduced one of my favorite character designs in Ava, and did nothing with her, marked her for death, and then killed her without ever showing her die... Terrible.
@@ghostplasma5590 how's that even possible
@@martyscurllisinnocent4324 you know for a long time I was thinking of doing a video explaining why ANF is actually the best season. If me saying I enjoy it the most makes people think "HoW Is ThAt EvEn PoSsIbLe" then I will do in fact do it
@@ghostplasma5590 "How's that even possible" Javier was so bland compared to Clementine that you just couldn't get invested into him or his story
I won’t say anything regarding Kenny because he is a complicated character but Jane…I’m going to have to respectfully disagree about her being a good role model to Clem.
To me and a lot of my friends who have played twdg, Jane is the exact opposite of Molly from s1 and it’s so bizarre. Molly despised the survival of the fittest mentality that Crawford had regarding anyone that needed any kind of special treatment, including children, the elderly and those with medical problems unrelated to the apocalypse. She just wanted her and her sister to survive and didn’t think her sister’s diabetes should’ve denied them support. By meeting her, we learn that everyone deserves to live and that someone’s unchangeable traits shouldn’t doesn’t make them any lesser or unworthy of living or being protected.
And then here comes Jane with the exact opposite mindset, telling you never to stick around for or get close to anyone that could be considered a liability and Sarah, a very young girl who is clearly autistic coded, is treated like a liability because she’s “weak.” I’m also not a huge fan of how you discuss Jane’s sister and her death and how she had “given up”. She was clearly suicidal and in pain and Jane encouraged her that this is what she wanted when they were cornered and just left her to be eaten by walkers, what I can only imagine is the worst way to go. Even if it would’ve been hard for Jane to save her, it’s disgusting that she handled it that way. She helps Clem and teaches her these things because she can tell she’s already very survival focused and is written to be mature. Yet she doesn’t extend any of this help (from what I can recall) to Sarah, because she already views her as a broken lost cause. I also felt like it was unnecessary to bring up if you think whether or not Sarah wanted to die because quite frankly it’s irrelevant. She’s a young sheltered autistic girl who’s been protected by her father her entire life and has a complete mental break down when he dies which leaves her in a catatonic state in the RV. As someone on the spectrum who’s had very intense panic attacks in the past, sometimes even while proclaiming that I want to die, I never actually wanted to. It’s just the only thing I could think of and in the moment, I wrongly assumed that me dying was the only way to stop my pain.
I know that in the apocalypse, not everything is easy and you can’t be soft and gentle all the time and you need that tough love and douse of reality but Jane’s view of the world and people deeply troubles me, again, maybe because I heavily relate to Sarah and see a lot of her traits in me
I absolutely love your comment - 100% agree
Wait how is Sarah Autistic, is it because her dad (Couldn’t remember his name) said in episode one he said “If she see what actually the real world she would flip out” (That’s not what actually he said but I couldn’t remember what he fully said.
I’m autistic and never once did I get “autistic coded” from Sarah. She is literally shown to be completely sheltered, thus left ignorant, by Carlos. He doesn’t allow her to know anything about how bad the world is, and as a result, she doesn’t know how to survive. And those are the vibes I, personally, got from her. She’s ignorant, and that’s what makes her “weak”, even though it isn’t her fault.
@@smileymctrashbag Yeah me too, I just thought when she witnessed her father dying that she was so traumatized that it cause her to be a wreck. Since Carlos babysit her for a long time it made Sarah think he is the only person to trust and when she lost him it cause her to have a hard time to do it since she alone.
Jane is one of my top 5 most hated characters. I think she is absolutely horrible.
I liked Nick I wanted him to get a redemption ark so bad, I even thought he would until I got him to far in the story and they just killed him off screen and you have to kill him as a walker stuck in the fence.
I thought that was so lame, I was so excited to find him again and there he was, a walker that was helplessly stuck in a chain link fence, it felt like everything I did to get him that far wasn’t even worth it, almost like I should have let him die where the game had intended it the first time.
I was the same. I’m fact the whole cabin group (minus Pete) I believe could’ve had more done with them.
Nick could’ve had a story about Clem honouring a dying man’s wish/ showing him there’s more to live for more than just breathing.
Sarah could’ve been about showing she can survive.
Alvin could’ve showed he’s not all good with him murdering a man at Howe’s.
Rebecca could’ve improved with us finding about her past with Carver and maybe we find out Alvin can’t have children and in a drunken state she sleeps with Carver. Giving more nuance.
Carlos we could have found out he intentionally lied about the dog bite, where his wife is, him being untrusting and stuff.
Luke just should’ve taken Jane’s place in fight against Kenny. And if we had to create a reason of why Luke would fight Kenny, we could have a potential miscommunication between the two over AJ’s fate.
Oh, and I would’ve had Sarah and Nick be additional optional characters to survive the season along with Kenny or Luke
Right like Nick having almost no lines or presence after the Walter decision then just having him die in on a fence was so stupid.
@@fireassassin16 you got two more dialogue with him plus he his visible on the background for the rest of the game until he die
I know you were joking but no one can pretend Christa's baby survived. During episode 4 when Rebecca gives birth, the baby is still at first, and Clem says, "Oh no, not again." But then the baby breathes, etc
Holy shit I never realized that
Season 2 is just one of those messes where it feels like all of your choices don't matter, and if you pick Jane you get this horrible ending where she basically manipulates you, gets pregnant, and then commits suicide on you. At least Kenny stuck with you until The bitter end, and I feel like that was a better ending than anything else this season had to offer to me.
Sara is a really interesting, wasted character imo in that the game devs clearly didn't like her and didn't want you to like her. She just doesn't really exist for much outside of a dev punching bag and a character for the players to be annoyed with. Interesting to note, but as it was released I remember quite a few autistic people relating to her because of the way she was written, even if she wasn't written well or treated well either. As an autistic person who didn't know I was autistic as the game was released, it's interesting to look back on and realize that may have been at least a facet of why her whole presence in the game just felt kind of bad.
god that's even more disturbing looking back. it doesn't help that i kind of looked like sarah did at that age, so it was incredibly distressing to watch her die so horribly >_
For sure, especially with her thinking she and Clem were the same age. She was on the spectrum whether the devs knew it or not :p
I think it would have been interesting Sarah to adapt and grow strong with help of Clementine, despite not been used to harsh world and is traumatized. But of course, that didn't happen because devs hated her :/
My baby Sarah deserved better. Also, spoilers for the final season here.
I think it's funny to play Lee as the one guy that tries to be a mediator in the conflict between Lily and Kenny and even be sympathetic towards her father's death (who he can also try to save), while Clementine in the final season can tell her her father was an asshole and so is Lilly.
Honestly the way most fans feel about the characters in New Frontier is how I felt about the characters in Season Two. All of the adults that Clementine found herself stuck with in that game were infuriating to me, aside from Kenny. I don't understand how they could pat themselves on the back for leaving Clem to die in a shed (if they were so concerned about her turning they could have literally tied her up inside, but they were all so coddled by Carver that they didn't even consider it), then getting this child and Kenny's group kidnapped and thrown into a labour camp AFTER getting two innocent people murdered from his tiny group, and then ONCE THEY ESCAPE THEY WANT TO BERATE THE ONLY HARDENED AND CAPABLE APOCALYPSE SURVIVOR BECAUSE HE WAS (rightfully) ANGRY??? Don't even get me started on how Clem got shot because Bonnie and Mike wanted to rob and abandon the group cuz they felt bad for Arvo. Jane whole ass risked the life of an infant just so she could have Clem shoot a dear old friend at the end, but I was supposed to WANT to go with her?
I hated all the new characters in Season Two. Kenny may have been pissed after that group came along and fucked up what he had found, yet he was always the first to step up and protect the remaining survivors despite his rage.
You could probably tell from my rant that I happily let Kenny stab Jane to death at the end because I was relieved to FINALLY be free of the people who had very little regard for the safety of Clem, and yes I did ugly cry when Clem and AJ split from Kenny to be safe in Wellington.
I personally see this season as a very big mixed bag. Some characters I really liked (Luke and Pete), some I absolutely had no sympathy for, (Jane and Bonnie). I'm actually kinda disappointed with the end result, but that may be because of how much I loved the first season. Regardless, I can't wait to see hear your opinions on the next two seasons when they are ready! :D
Thank you Sparrow! I really liked Luke and Pete too, I feel like there was missed potential with them. I sincerely hope you enjoy the video, thank you for watching
@i gotsa know! maybe some but I’ve personally never liked her as a character you can tell she’s a snake from the very beginning when she first appears in the 400 days dlc. Her whole “character arch” is cheater, then liar, and finally backstabber. Def the worse character imo
@@SomeOne-lx8zx lmfaoo your description of her character has me crying 😭
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this season. I loved that Kenny returned but I feel like he gets way too much hate. People keep saying that he was a monster and that he didn’t love Clementine or cared about her and I saw so many people defend Jane for hiding AJ in the frozen car by saying that she was in the right to do that. I hated that everyone made Kenny look like a bad person and expected Clementine to do everything since she was the main character.
I agree with you. I don’t think Kenny didn’t love her, I think having lost Katjaa/Duck in the first game broke him mentally. It makes plenty of sense to me that he is more easily irritated, and ready to snap over every little thing. He never really got to grieve his first loss, then he loses Sarita, too. He’s lost literally anyone he loves, and he can’t take it. He snaps at Clem and pushes her away and blames her for things, because if he gets too close, he’ll lose her too. Really, Clem/Kenny are all the other has left of Lee, too. So it’s like Kenny would be losing him again.
@@smileymctrashbag I feel so bad for Kenny. He lost too much.
@@smileymctrashbag I agree that it makes sense for Kenny to become the person he is in season 2, but I don't think that absolves him. Even as much as he's been through is not an excuse to lash out at everyone around you and be violent. There are people who have been through worse and were still better people afterward. As good as the ending is when you leave with him, only to stay at the safe zone without him, it feels dirty after letting him murder Jane, even though I didn't like her at all and really liked Kenny. I like that when you stop him, he realizes how far gone he was and tells Clem that it was the right choice before he dies. Morally, I think it really is, even though Clem being alone with the baby or with Jane are the worse options as far as survival goes.
Yeah I never got the hate. All Jane fans arguments fall through the ice once you realize all she had to was “A.J. is alive.” That’s it.
@@ryanelliott71698 I think Kenny would have killed her anyway.
You absolutely nailed all the reasons I was so disappointed with season 2. It makes sense when people defer to Lee for group decisions in season 1. He’s, y’know, an actual adult who provides not just for Clementine, but also for the group as a whole. He’s constantly volunteering to get them supplies, go hunting, etc.
Here we have season 2, where grown adults are deferring to a child who they’ve only met not 48 hours earlier. In some of their cases, they even tried to kill her. So why are they allowing her to make all of these big decisions for the group?? The writers clearly never cared to even try and justify this, so this issue hangs over the story like a giant cloud. Another point is that, while in season 1, yes, choices were absolutely limited and sometimes didn’t make a big difference in the story, you still *felt* as though your decisions had weight. In season 2, this is all thrown out. Your choices explicitly don’t matter and no matter what you do, what you say, how you act, you will always end up with the same, all encompassing choice between Kenny and Jane in the end. Like, give me options. Let me be close with Jane, or Luke, or Kenny, or hell, wild idea, let Clementine side with Carver. Give me freedom to decide who the next ‘Lee’ is, and let me explore that relationship to their fullest extent. Let me interact with the world instead of forcing me to sit down and just let the world happen to me. Anyways, seriously amazing video, both the commentary and the editing. You and your brother did a great job and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing your take on such a disappointment of a game.
If I had a nickel for everytime a zombie apocalypse game where the main character is a father surrogate trying teach a child how to survive became critically acclaimed and then had a sequel so many people hated, I'd have two nickels.
People didn’t really hate season 2, it was actually really well liked
When it comes to the ending and choice between Kenny and Jane, having been abused, both mentally and physically by a woman who is a copy paste image of Jane, I could never trust her. Her having almost all the same manipulative and antisocial characteristics, I only disliked her more the longer she was on screen.
Exactly, Kenny my be rough around the edges but Jane is just an awful person. Her complete and utter selfishness is just confirmed in the next game when she kills herself after she finds out she’s pregnant and leaves Clementine and AJ completely alone after already leaving her once before
I hated Jane.
@@MarcellusMaize Many people argue that Jane's flashback death goes against her character but from what I've seen, it works perfectly, exposing her inner cowardice and selfishness.
Hey! I forgot where I heard this, I think in extra features for the 4th season, but Christa was GOING TO BE IN SEASON 4 as friend/enemy but INSTEAD they brought back Lily because Lily would make more sense to be a villain.
That is so interesting!! Thank you Rass! :D
I think they did a poll or game or something to decide.
THANK god she didn't end up as a villain.
i just want to say. i literally have never touched a console controller in my life but i watch your videos religiously; you have almost made me throw up laughing before and i actually started “trophy” achievement hunting through my apple arcade games because of you! i love your content dearly please never stop
Karissa your comment gives me life, thank you so much for watching my stuff and it's a pleasure to know you enjoy it :)
I felt the thing about Sarah so hard. I remember playing through and kind of getting attached to her, and feeling so uncomfortable with how the game treated her. The absolute contempt the narrative had for her was so sad
MertKayKay: Jane is a better person than Kenny.
The end of s2 and flashback with Jane in s3:
- Jane admitted that she lied about AJ's death so she can show Clem how dangerous Kenny is despite the lost him losing everything such as his family, his eye, and his girlfriend. Developing the need to protect his two kids to never go through the pain again. (Jane lives)
- As Clem was leaving her, Jane manipulated her into staying with her (Leave Jane)
- Hanged herself after a few months (s3 flashback with Jane)
The end of s2 and flashback with Kenny in s3:
- Kenny admitted Clem that he let her and everyone down as he was dying (Kill Kenny)
- Begs Edith to let Clem and AJ stay in Wellington to have a better life. (Go to Wellington)
- Tells Clem he doesn't trust himself with AJ and admits she'll be better off without him (Leave Kenny)
- Kenny stuck around with Clem for a few years. Teaching her how to drive (s3 flashback)
- Sacrificed himself so Clem and AJ can escape. (s3 flashback)
So tell me again who's the better person?
Absolutely.
The two things about Season 2 that absolutely pissed me off to no end and made me give up on the writing completely:
1. Despite going against Kenny whenever possible after he started showing his abusive and unstable tendencies, when the reasonable characters elect to leave this shitshow and I chose the dialogue option to try and go with them, Arvo still shot Clem for being liked by Kenny.
2. At the end, after shooting and killing Kenny because holy shit was he a problem, there's no dialogue option with Jane to point out how fucked up and horrible her idea of "hey let's provoke the unstable and violent man by pretending to let the baby die" was but still stay with her out of pragmatism, your choices are either thanking her for opening your eyes about how bad Kenny was because Clem is so naïve she never noticed, or angrily refusing to have anything to do with her and walking off on your own with the baby (because an 11 year old and a baby surviving in a snowstorm on their own is a great idea). It's such a horrible black and white choice where your only options are the two extremes.
Absolutely agree, the season is absolutely crammed full of dialogue options that never actually address what you want to address, so it's frustrating on such a fundamental level
You would never had a chance to go with Arvo them in his eyes Clem killed his sister.
I get what you’re saying but Jane was definitely worse than Kenny but also Mike, Bonnie (if she’s alive) & Arvo were iffy too, I get that Kenny was unstable but he was still more trustworthy than anyone else that was alive at that point when they were going to steal all the rations and the truck smh, but you only focused on Kenny & not Jane who later on if you killed Kenny, basically gives up on you by saying she wasn’t ever going to leave you again then finds out that she’s pregnant then off’d herself, but Kenny is the only bad guy lol okay
@@justin219 Which is unfair because Arvo and his group decides to attack you regardless of if you steal from Arvo or not & his irrational mind didn’t absorb the fact that his sister was already dead and reanimated when killed ended her smh, Season 3 is still the worst season lol
L you didnt have a kenny ending
as for the jane vs kenny fight, i dont remember where i saw this but i believe it was supposed to be kenny vs luke with luke playing a bigger role in clem’s story but too many people were guessing the ending so the writers changed the story last minute. i’m not sure if this was a theory or if it was in fact confirmed, but it kinda shows in the writing.
Somewhat correct, they decided to kill Luke for dramatic effect, and also scrapped the off-screen point system that would affect the character's strength and dialogue during the final fight.
I felt season 2 set the expectations for future seasons in a very negative way. After season 1 many players expected that final set of actions would be the edifice that would determine Clementine's path forward but instead they went the opposite path. Once you started the season the first episode would erase the previous cast and give you a new set. Creating a hard restart but peppering in things for returning players. So when Season 3 and The Final Season began players would expect the same treatment, mostly everyone is gone from the previous season and we are starting fresh. With that direction set it was hard to grow attach to anyone.
I agree with you this was likely done because of Telltale's poor management that had their staff crunching to shove games out. Unlike Doug/Carley's death which was to establish that death can happen and at unexpected times much of the cast in season 2 just dropped in the most bewildering ways possible. Like they were trying to get rid of them to set up season 3. Which starts by erasing your final decision of season 2 like it didn't matter.
Very true! Every season they wiped the slate clean and everyone would be dead or gone by the end of it, all cleaned up ready for the next cast. As I played through the series it started to make choices feel very hollow, knowing that the game would remove those choices at a moment's notice.
Thanks for watching Harbinger
Despite how the studio ended, and the whole mess there, it is nice to see someone talking about one of their games again. They made some great stuff, and (even if the video is critical) it's good to remind people that these games are out there.
Hey Simon! And yes I agree! Most of the issues with this season were definitely down to crunch and resources so it could have gone somewhere really good with it I think
Did they? I sincerely hope that it's not the same people in charge.
@@TheBlueLink3 they dont have rights for the twdg anymore so sadly they wont get a second chance
See I never got why people still considered THIS season the bad one of the 4. Yeah, it's a downgrade from one but it still had that great throughline of Kenny and Clem that really held it all together for me. Their reunion at the lodge is still a top 10 gaming moment for me. It just hits the emotional beat so perfectly. I never understood why you'd side with Jane come the ending, I never trusted her and expected her to run off with Arvo and Mike but just didn't. Kennys impulsive but its because he lost 3 families, 1 by blood and 2 found families. He's an old broken man holding onto any innocence he can find in this world, and that's Clem and AJ. Jane felt like a cold person who avoided attachment because it'd make it harder for her to survive. Kennys a man weighed down by his emotional attachments while Jane intentionally avoids them to avoid the same weight Kenny faces.
While I agree with you on the storyline with Kenny being very emotionally compelling and this season not being the worst... Yeah I can't agree on trusting Kenny by the end of the season.
For me he doesn't just come across like a father figure, he's basically the same guy my actual dad is. Ie, has an untrusting, abusive streak whenever he loses his temper, but gentle and seemingly understanding when he's calm and with people he's willing to trust. It's not a good trait, and it's never just because of what they lose. It's a result of emotional dysregulation (which to be fair can be worsened by trauma), and however much they insist they'll never hurt the ones they love, they always do in the end, indirectly or otherwise.
Kenny is self destructive, and by the end of the season he's thoroughly in the wrong, especially with trying to kill Jane. No matter how much you trust her, he's crossing a line. Even though I first played this before going no contact with my own father, I could see how bad of a decision it would be to stick by Kenny in the last choice. Kenny is the kind of guy who would just keep making the same choices no matter how many times he sees the consequences of his own actions. It's sad, and horrible, but there's no saving him from that even if you side with him and let him kill Jane.
I didn't know people hated this. I thought it was an excellent season.
@@Dan2907
Not really arguing, it's just my take on Kenny given my experience with how dudes like this act irl.
He can't be trusted by the end of the season because by then he's shown he'll consistently choose actions that are aggressive and self destructive, without stopping to consider whether those actions will harm himself or others (including the people he says he cares for or trust). It's not about whether he lies or tells the truth, it's that he acts on his first angry impulse regardless of how harmful that could be. He ends up provoking completely unnecessary fights and arguments, he doesn't place a reasonable amount of trust in others even when not doing that will make the situation harder or more dangerous, etc.
Kenny can't always have only people he trusts around him, not that it stops him from making harmful decisions on impulse. In TWD, you have to be willing to take at least some chances on people around you to survive, or at least not turn everything into another argument or fight. Kenny doesn't do that, he constantly escalates things. It makes him self destructive and dangerous to everyone.
Also, while I'm not going to defend Jane's actions, I really don't buy that attacking Jane is justified. At the point he does that he doesn't know how she supposedly lost AJ, he doesn't wait to hear a reason or explanation, she's not an active threat to either Kenny or Clem in that moment, Kenny is just doing his usual routine of acting on his anger without thinking. That's not good enough. _Unknown_ to Kenny, Jane is doing what Kenny does, making an impulsive bad decision to provoke a fight (against her own character motivations, frustratingly). She's equally to blame in that contrived and stupid situation, but that doesn't justify Kenny escalating the situation and attacking her from the start, or killing her depending on whether Clem intervenes or not.
That Clem ends up in a situation where she has to shoot Kenny to prevent him from killing someone is a direct result of Kenny's decisions, and one that's unfair and traumatic for Clem no matter what decision is made. He put the child he was caring for in an emotionally devastating position because he couldn't control his own anger.
All he needed to do to avoid escalating that situation was to talk. Even losing his temper and arguing in this one situation would be understandable, and it would still avoid the outcome we got. Attacking Jane was the worst decision he could make, and he did it without thought or regard for even the child he was supposed to protect.
It's just a significant downgrade from the original, the writing is very weak. It's not as bad as the third, but that doesn't make it good.
@@thatboringone7851 completely disagree with ur take on Kenny Jane literally lied to Kenny about aj to see his reaction when she knew he's already lost a son n thinks of aj as his own Jane sucks and she kills herself later anyways while Kenny literally gives up his spot for Clementine and aj to stay safe at the base forget where it is Jane sucks
34:30 Um, maybe I'm just naive, but Larry's beef with Lee wasn't his race, but because he paid enough attention to the news to know Lee was a murderer. Lee has the option to claim Larry's a racist asshole, but that's implied to be his way of obfuscating from Mark Larry's real beef with him. The only character I think was maybe racist was Andy St. John from Episode 2, since he called Lee "boy" a couple times.
Larry ain’t racist, Larry even said he’d hurt Lee if anything happened to Clem who in canon is a black girl, most racists hate race regardless of age or sex, Larry ain’t one of them, but he’s a hard ass who gave everyone but his daughter a hard time.
@@hannahmariewilliams3548 I agree, its also the south in 2003, way different of a time. I personally think Larry was a supporter of the Senator he killed, since besides Larry, Lilly and Carley know what he did, but they don’t seem to care as much as him.
Psa: Lilly deserves more respect
@@PostCrisisRH I totally forgot the person Lee killed was a senator.
How the fuck does everyone not know who Lee is? Killing a local congressman kinda makes the news.
@@Adsper2000 Depends on if they cared or saw his face, how I see it people know the name from Lee Everett on the radio, so he shortens it to just Lee because anyone could be named that I guess.
Loool larry is definitely racist and im sure he based his racism of racial stereotypes
And as for the big man Kenny... I just wish they knew what they really wanted to do with Kenny; in early concepts he was supposed to be the villain of Season 2 and it shows at times, but at the same time they want to make him the second protagonist again and make you like him. They tried to make this weird balance between him being an uncontrollable asshole and a loving uncle but it worked at best 50% of the time... Which was still enough to make him the best character in this season... And that says quite a lot about the other characters.
I love the part when Clem is like "Why am I always the one that has to do everything?"
season 2 was so messy… they really didn’t know how to transfer the gameplay and responsibility the player got while playing as Lee and so it just comes across as super jarring when a group of adults are looking to a kid for help. it made all those characters come off as fumbling clowns who were completely doomed. imo season 3 worked much better because Javi was at least a capable and fleshed out character, but maybe that’s a controversial opinion. i still feel fond of season 2 though, but maybe that’s just nostalgia talking
Jane endangered the life of a baby, putting it in a car in a blizzard, to prove a point. There's literally no car that is warm enough that is off. Kenny all day!
Just saw this today and I think you really nailed it on analyzing the difference between the story-writing and the characters in this game in comparison to the first season. And having to learn that the event for either saving or leaving Sarah is just called "A Heavy Burden". Like not even just picking one or the other, just either way! That is so wrong! That has to be the worst thing they ever decided! She can be a little annoying when she's acting clingy when you first meet, but that doesn't mean she deserves to basically be given depression for living or have her grave danced on for dying.
I agree! Justice for Sarah! :'( Thank you for watching Lunar
@@MertKayKay You're welcome! I could've sworn I was subscribed but fixed the issue ^^
Sarah's death is what completely turned me off of Team Luke and Jane. Like how dumb and irresponsible can you be to have sex when your supposed to be on look-out, in the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, and then go "well it's been awhile" when it gets a group member killed? Unbelievable. It felt at the end I was given the choice of 'mentally and emotionally dealing with crazy until Kenny dies' or 'go with Jane and risk dying for some selfish whim', so I went with crazy.
Your logic checks out honestly!
The problem ends up being that as bad as Kenny is Jane's not much better. I feel like the best route was to kill Kenny and then ditch Jane. It's a shit sandwich all the way around, but that's the ingredients the game gives you.
@@forwardtsender8573 With how Jane and Kenny both unceremoniously die at the beginning of the third game I think that was the ending the devs were pushing for. It's just without the knowledge of what happens in 3 it seemed dumb to send off an 11 year old by herself with a baby, but they make it anyway so whatever
This season was screwed over hard by higher ups, budget and constant rewrites, if I’m not mistaken higher ups basically made the writers rewrite the script completely so many times, it’s why there’s that like… weird ‘competition’ between Luke and Kenny, it’s also why certain dialogue is hella weird, i think some of the writers called them ‘relics’ from the old scripts, which is why some characters just die for no reason, disappear, say weird things or have weird tension that goes nowhere
I can definitely imagine higher-ups making them rewrite the script over and over, there are so many moments in this that feel so fumbled!
I didn’t initially hate season 2, first time through it I loved it, but I was also a lot younger and not as critical of the media I consume, what I really hate about season 2 is that it wrote all the adults to be incompetent morons and they leave all the hard decisions to a little girl, and blaming her when things go wrong (*COUGH* Bonnie)
I can understand that they wanted the player to feel important and more engaged with the plot but it just doesn’t work considering they’re all much older than her.
That and the game constantly traumatizes her without having anything meaningful to say about that trauma, it passes off constant horrific events that happen left and right as “character development”
Trauma is an important part of character development, especially in a series like The Walking Dead, but it has to be handled correctly, nothing that happens in S2 feels organic or earned, it just constantly has horrible sh*t happen to her, a lot of times out of no where (like arvo shooting her)
It’s cheap hollow trauma with cheap shock factor tossed in the mix with a bunch of incompetent moronic adults making horrible decisions and leaving the hard choices to her. It’s poorly written and poorly executed.
You cannot use cheap trauma as an avenue to character development, and with how she was in season 3 it wasn’t worth it because she was extremely 1 note and shallow, and in season 2 she’s barely a character, she’s just a vessel for you to control, she hardly ever expresses herself or argues with anyone, and when she does it’s half baked at best, she’s so submissive to the characters around her and plot, she doesn’t feel like a person, just an object that becomes the seasons punching bag to constantly traumatize her.
Awful terrible season. Worst one they made.
Oh my gosh yes, absolutely agree. The adults letting her make all the decisions was completely absurd. They definitely gave Clem a more mature outlook and sometimes you can just hear the writers talking directly through her, and it makes the game and the relationships in the game feel so strange, especially when they boil it down to silly things like "well who are you sitting with at lunch?"
The trauma that you mentioned is definitely a huge deal. Clementine gets absolutely battered back and forth in some of the worst, most gratuitous ways, I guess to demonstrate her toughness? But in the end you're just watching a little girl get the shit beaten out of her and it's exhausting.
@@MertKayKay in season 4 she’s a much stronger character but we don’t see her transition from her 1 note season 3 self to her more complex and realistic season 4 self. The transition feels kind of strange cause there’s a whole lot of context we’re just not shown or told. They’re two completely different characters lol.
You hit every note on the reason why I don’t like this season. It doesn’t help the fact that in season three she just acts like the group that she met in season two. People act like none of the characters are likable in season three, but honestly for me, Clementine is one of the worst in season three, I guess they decided if she was going to be so traumatized in season two that they might as well make her a jerk in response to it
I’m extremely thankful that they reeled her character back in for season four, but it’s also a shame we won’t see Javier anymore, personally, I liked him a lot, and I should’ve expected the season with the most changeable outcomes not to have a continuation because they’d probably think it’s too hard to make an episode stacked on all the optional outcomes
@@dawsond4123Javier was a great character, he was the highlight of S3 for me. It’s just a shame he’s surrounded by terrible writing cause he’s just such a likable character. He’s got Charisma in droves.
I know it would be technically impossible, especially considering the conditions at telltale, but i wish they made decisions stick more between games. Each season operates, for the most part, completely independently from the decisions in the prior season, i guess that’s the illusion of choice in these games. I thought your analysis was great! S2 really killed the momentum of the series
What really annoyed me about the illusion of choice making in Telltale is that stupid catchphrase “Your choice adapt to the story and tailor it.”
I remember trying to play season 2 when I was pretty young, at least to be playing a game like this. Anyways, I tried to explain the plot to my mom, because she was a big Walking Dead TV show fan, and I remember so vividly her telling me that she wasn’t sure if she wanted me playing based on what I was describing… and honestly she was right. I’ve tried to return and finish this series since, but GODDAMN it’s just way too bleak for me. Please, please make videos on the rest of the seasons so I can find out what I missed
I loved the characters in this season but my only real problem was how it felt like they mischaracterized Kenny. In season one he was a reasonable man and although he was angry a lot you could always see why. Season 2 they just made him weirdly aggressive and kind of manipulative towards clem
I agree! I feel like they really doubled-down on him here and it alienated me hard lmao
Na Kenny been like that low key like if you don’t side with him your wrong 😭
@@i.iconicannie7923 yeah im playing through for the first time and about to start S2 Ep 5 (i know i got a decision to make lol) sided with Kenny with basically every decision besides killing Larry and i punched him (cause bro shit hell understand) and i became the devil incarnate. Hated him since and then his reaction to Sarita dying hate him more. Idk who im picking tho at the end 😭
SN: he called me unfit for clem and stayed back thats what really did it tbh
Another issue is that the game keeps you distracted by all the plot detours and romantic misunderstandings that the charming idysincrasy of the series is sometimes lost in all the noise. This game has a really unpleasant centerfold sheen to it and the narrative has a very lather, rinse, repeat nature. Also Carvers introduction defies logic. He is wondering around a cabin all by himself expecting to kidnap a group of people who outnumber him. He wasted ammo and stamina tracking down a woman only to threaten to kill her the next day. He was really just a tired plot device used to pad the game. If you remove him from the plot nothing would really change. I'll give him credit in one aspect. He was intimidating unlike LILLY or the Stanger. Those two had no tangible menace.
Kenny is Clem's abusive father. That doesn't mean he doesn't love her. Because he does. But he's not healthy. He's not mentally stable or able to be a good father to anyone. I loved Kenny, mostly because he's so much like my own father, who I love so... So much... But he's not good, not good for me, not good for anyone. He's even a bearded skinny Floridian lol. I think this game handled Kenny pretty well. And his "redemption" in the end if you kill or leave him isn't really a redemption. He wasn't a "softie all along". He just knows that he's not good for you. He knows you're you're better off without him, and he doesn't want you to feel guilt for it. I like it.
You know I feel sometimes the "marked for death" halo could just be avoided not for every character but some. I'm sure after a near death event some characters if they were just given an out after surviving would leave. You could even have a moment where they say there goodbyes and just leave, you wouldn't just have to drag along a character that was already meant to be dead.
Exactly! Why does everyone need to be eliminated from the game by dying!
I hated the way the writers handle Sarah's character. It made me appericate Season 1 more for allowing Clementine to act like a child, without dehumanizing her as a being a "liability" or paint her as "annoying" for behaving like a child.
It's like the players who found Sarah to be annoying got what they wanted since the game never tries to make the played feel gulity for treating Sarah like shit.
No hate or anything but I completely disagree with your Kenny and Jane analysis. Kenny has very valid reasons to be angry throughout the game. Though he does have his moments where he's tripping, most of the major things he was valid on. He didn't really have time to get over his hate for the group before they started causing trouble. They invite the group in, only for them to refuse to put down their weapons. And so they're off to a bad start, then some crazy guy and his group(Carver) shows up and attacks them, killing Walter. Then carver snatches them up and takes them to his camp. Though I will say Kenny was being stupid in the ride to the camp, he was trying to escape the situation that these strangers brought to his doorstep and got him involved in. Then he talks of making plans to escape and they're kinda just like, "whatever Kenny, behave" which is understandable because they're scared of carver but also annoying for Kenny cause he doesn't wanna be stuck there. Then the escape plan goes bad and his eye gets hurt. Then sarita dies, then the baby is born and the arvo incident happens and everyone acts like he's a horrible monster for being mad at Arvo, who got them into this mess, then Jane hides AJ to start a conflict. Meanwhile Jane is horrible and selfish. The only thing useful about her is her survival skills. She doesn't care about clem and only looks out for herself. She constantly encourages clem to abandon everything else and be a loner.
Season 2 had a lot of changes in production. Rewrites were made constantly so the fact that it resembles some sort of a semi-coherent story is pretty surprising. It's a hot mess though.
The experiment that was telltale will never not live in my head rent free. I love the choose your own adventure format but outside of text based games, open world games that don’t care when you tackle the plot like Skyrim, or real short moments like the Stanley parable, a narrative driven game just can’t be it unless you have the resources to make 400 games into just one game. Outside of the fact that they were just crapping out games every month it felt like, I think a big problem they had both externally and internally, and it shows in this season especially, that they hyped and seemed to believe in their own hype that these games cared about your choices. That was there thing and they wanted it to be their thing, but it just wasn’t. They were graphic novels with 3d models and quick time events, which is rad, but they would never admit it. Not even to mention the fact I can’t even imagine the burnout someone gets after writing one of these games given the whole game is the writing, and being asked to do it again is wild. Moral of the story is “what could have been” will never leave me, and can we find some billionaires to make a game company that can make a true choose your own adventure where it is 10,000 games in one? I would like that a real lot.
My sibling introduced me to you and you definitely make some of the best background noise a ND person could ask for. You’re very funny and engaging without requiring 100% focus and I would think that’s likely a hard balance to strike. Thank you for filling many a silence and making my life less unbearably long.
It's a pleasure to hear it Skooge! I'm really happy you like my videos and thanks so much for watching them
It was at around Episode 3 and 4 was where I felt that Telltale's TWD was starting to go downhill for me. Here were my main complaints about S2:
* Kenny was brought back, and he was shilled to a ridiculous degree in spite of being a rubbish leader with severe anger issues that can't take criticism. He had also placed Clementine in danger several times, such as planting a stolen radio onto her even if she says no, and forces his group to traverse to Wellington during an upcoming BLIZZARD with no clear destination. His plot was also a repeat of his story in Season 1, and not only has he not learned anything from his experiences, he doubled down with his issues and got more angry and stubborn to the point where he became a threat to his group's lives. By the time he snapped and tried to kill Jane, I was glad to shoot him dead.
* Jane is also portrayed as a capable, pragmatic survivor, but ended up being highly incompetent and unnecessarily cruel. Not only does she try to persuade the player to abandon Sarah, she has the nerve to call her a liability, when almost everything Jane does ends up nearly getting herself or Clementine killed. Her plan to hide baby AJ and push the already unstable Kenny over the edge, just to convince Clementine that he's a lost cause, was the stupidest plan ever to have concieved in that moment. Did she not think to just ASK Clementine if she feels safe around Kenny?
* The Cabin Group's role abruptly ends during the second half of the season, and then existed only to fill up the death tally. The S1 DLC survivors, except for Bonnie, were only used as cameos and have no role in S2 whatsoever. Carver was also a one-dimensional incompetent thug, and was quickly killed off before we even learned more about the Cabin Group and Carver's history. In the end, their roles amounted to nothing in S2.
* The mean-spirited portrayal and death of Sarah was outright disgusting. She's portrayed as a liability that should be left behind to die horribly, nevermind that Kenny, Jane, Luke, Ben, Nick, and several others have done far more harm to the group's survival than a sheltered fifteen-year-old girl with PTSD (confirmed by Telltale) who had just saw her father killed and eaten in front of her (which everyone forgets in Amid the Ruins). Sarah deserved better, since she was far more likable and interesting that most of the characters to me.
* Bonnie and Mike's betrayal, and Arvo shooting Clementine, felt railroaded and designed to persuade the player to stay with Kenny and/or Jane, who were both unlikable and were a threat to the group's safety. It felt manipulative and unneccesary, and ends up validating Kenny's highly irrational and overly violent method of leading the group.
* Clementine in Season 2 was relied on far too much to do everything for the group, even though she's eleven years-old and everyone around her were adults that should be more than capable. She also wasn't as engaging as a playable character, since the story didn't do more to explore how an eleven-year-old would cope in the zombie apocalypse, and ended up taking the easy way out by portraying her as just as competent as everyone else (sans Sarah, who never got the chance to grow as a character).
On the topic of how Sarah was treated, one thing that really gets my blood boiling is the double standard on how the fanbase and the developers treated Sarah vs how they treat the AJ.
On the fanbase side, they keep throwing hate her way for being a liability, saying things like "she was never going to make it" or "you're only delaying the inevitable", or just act all high and mighty about it saying stuff like "if you don't pull your own weight than you deserve to die", but when it comes to the newborn AJ the stuff said about Sarah magically doesn't apply here.
On the developer side, they keep shoving it down my throat to leave her to die for being a liablilty/burden, basically treating me like an idiot for wanting to help her out, kill her off 20 minutes later in the most insulting fashion, then in the interview talk about how they hated her and were eager to brutally kill her off. They do all this mean-spirited stuff, and yet they expect me to care about a newborn baby, and said baby is apparently this perfectly well behaved baby with an insane amount of plot armor.
So in a struggle to survive a post apocolyptic scenario we can't spend the time to at least try to help a 15 year old sheltered kid be more self-sufficient is impossible you're an idiot for thinking otherwise, but we can totally spend years taking care of a baby. It's apparently so easy that an 11 year old girl can raise a baby by herself.....
I'd say that Sarah's treatment (and the Kenny favortism) are what made me lose interest in the series and also made me stop buying a Telltale game altogether.
Sarah literally was one of my favorite characters & it was kind of gross how they handled her.
Same! I thought she had so much promise and at first she seemed so keen to grow, and then they just dropped her hard. It was very frustrating.
@@MertKayKay Exactly, I've seen a lot of autistic people identify with her as well & frankly gosh if they were going that angle it's pretty gross. I remember reading a fanfiction where the story explicitly focuses on Clem & Sarah as the main characters that I can share if you want!
Think it's a well-done exploration of the material, trims down un-needed characters & keeps Christa in the story, while giving you a much more valid reason to hate the new cast or be angry at them!
@@AbstractTraitorHero What's the fanfic called? :D
@@MertKayKay Did you get the post its called Young & Young at heart on Archive of our own.
@@AbstractTraitorHero thanks! I was about to search for some Justice for Sarah fics right now
Honestly, the relationship of Lee and Clem was the best thing about Telltale's Walking Dead, and Kenny is by far one of the best characters in teh game. But really, the Walking Dead games is stuffed full with all the problems that Telltale has as writers and it's infuriating
Saying that everyone hated it is hyperbole, It's always been my personal favourite. Idk, of course it has problems but so does every piece of media from what I've seen.
Hyperbole is my bread and butter honestly, it's the only way I know how to communicate and it rarely ends well :(
"The game wants you to like Kenny." Definitely didn't work in my case. And this season was the main reason I didn't touch the later seasons, it was so so badly written and executed.
It might just be because I've been around unstable adults as a kid, but I just could not warm up to Kenny at all. He was unhinged to the point where it was scary and frustrating just to be around him. Jane was the one I sided with every chance I got, she seemed way more sane and safe for Clem by comparison.
How could you like Jane though after what she did in the end? She put AJ in danger just to prove a point about Kenny. Kenny wouldn't have snapped at all if it wasn't for what she did. 💀
Kenny has issues no doubt and you're free to dislike him but he cared about Clem and AJ very much and will do anything to protect them.
@@BlueBlur2003 Yeah, I definitely see your point, Jane absolutely didn't need to push Kenny over the edge like she did. I guess for me the end decision came down to:
Kenny snaps big time
-> Kenny seems very unstable and scary to be around
-> Jane feels like the safer option to go with
I'd also spent the whole season bonding with Jane so it didn't make sense to turn on her all of a sudden? The thing I liked about Jane, from the start, was how she didn't let herself be held back by "pack mentality", most of the time, and didn't need to. After playing through Season 1 and some of Season 2, I was getting sick of all the bickering, discord and dysfunctionality in literally every single group Clem was in, and encountering a character who could potentially teach Clem to survive on her own? Seemed pretty good.
Not saying my logic was perfect by any means, but that's what I went with at the time :) No hate for Kenny, poor guy had it ROUGH and deserved better, but he just wasn't a good team match for my version of Clem.
Right, and some thoughts about the AJ thing at the end: When they (Jane and Clem) retrieved him from the car I think initially I just thought "Oh okay, you stashed him here safely until the situation was resolved, nice." Didn't think it through at the time but now I'm realizing what a shitty thing that was to do. If Jane got herself into a fight with Kenny and died, there was 0 guarantee Clem and Kenny would ever find AJ without her to tell them he was alive and where to find him. Too much of a gamble to make on someone's life. But, at the time I was just thinking "Okay, she left him in a safe place for a few moments" without thinking about it beyond that.
Longer reply than was necessary but there's what I can remember about my thought process at the time haha.
I have to say, one thing that really made this season so fun, for me at least, were the teasers that would drop like a week before each episode. The episode 5 teaser genuinely made me emotional upon first watch. I wish they kept that same energy for seasons 3 and 4
I used to be obsessed with the Telltale Walking Dead, it was a big part of my earlier years on the internet.
But I apparently don't remember anything about the second season. I remember the opening and the ending but that's it. Which is impressive, I have no idea how it got from point a to point b.
This game could have been much better, and I believe it really did get better series wise. But it always felt more like "How does Clem survive without Lee" rather than "How did Lee change Clem" which I felt like isn't a theme explored often in sequels, 'how did the previous events really change the protagonist' is overlooked more often for 'more action and world building' even though most of the time the former is copy and paste from another genre and the latter isn't even that good.
Also, for your brother: if he's trying to show us who a character is use still images rather than labeling the name over a video playing of the characters. About a fourth of the way in the video the name Becca shows up and kinda just floats around and its hard to see who it's applied to.
Hey Froggie! Thanks for the feedback for Smooth, I'll deliver it to him.
And thank you for watching! I really love the later episodes (I think Season 4 is an awesome piece of work). I love that you remember the opening and ending of it and nothing in between; I have to say I agree. I think this episode is so without stakes that there's no real peaks and troughs to observe and remember at all
FINALLY SOMEONE WHO KNOWS AND HEARD CHRISTA DIE. NO ONE ELSE REALISES IT BUT I HEARD IT TOO. EVERYONE THINKS SHES MISSING BUT I HEARD THEM LITERALLY SHOOT HER
Everybody heard the shot but nobody knows who was shooting or if she was killed
That's why Clementine keeps asking about her.
will never ever ever understand any hate this game gets. fucking masterpiece. 1,2, and 4 are all legendary games.
I'm glad so many of us are on the same page of "Season 3 was objectively the *worst* season." Because oh lord that game was so boring and forgettable it made me actively forget it happened. You could just remove the 3rd season and literally nothing changes.
Honestly Season 2 gets a lot more love because it gave us a bunch of interesting characters (still a firm believer that Luke's death was 100% unneeded/Christa not having a conclusive fate was annoying), plus the fanfic/fanart side of the community really made works based around seasons 1, 2 and 4 more than 3... _god it was such a bad season-_
Also, Jane was... a mixed bag for me and still is. I get her point that she knew years of trauma was weighing on Kenny but her idea of faking AJ's death to prove it was the absolute worst way of going about it and every playthrough I've done I just let her die or abandon her because of it. Like, girlie I don't know what you thought faking the death of a newborn infant was going to do to the man who took him in as his own and who's lost his entire family but go off I guess? Also Kenny isn't an angel too and I wish people would acknowledge he's been fucking up since the start of the season (like blaming Clem for Sarita's death) and overall his general attitude within the group, and that's coming from THE #1 Kenny the Dolphin Hunter fan.
But I do understand the criticisms.
I loved Luke and hated what they did to him. It made more sense for it to be Luke vs Kenny. Yes I know that Luke wouldn't have pulled what Jane did but I feel like the fight between Luke and Kenny would've been about something like Luke trying to talk to Kenny about him being unstable. I never forgave Rebecca for essentially telling an 11 year old child that they found alone to go die and I was mean to her every chance we got apart from when Alvin asked for the food since I actually liked Alvin. Also Jane as a character never really made sense and I hold the opinion that she could've easily been replaced by Molly from season 1. We could've met her at the Ski lodge with Kenny using the explanation that she saved him back in season 1 which makes more sense than Kenny just getting lucky. Or she could've tagged along with Clementine, Christa, and Omid and then we meet back up with her at Carver's where she could give us closure on Christa. Heck all the stealth missions that Clem had like stealing the walkie talkies and turning on the speakers could've been done by Molly and we could've played as her for those bits which makes more sense than everyone constantly putting missions on the 11 year old. Both Molly and Luke could've been the new mentor figures for the season. Molly and Clem could've easily had that sisterly bond and even Sarah since I could totally see her teaching both Clem and Sarah some of her moves. We could still have the part of her and Luke and her getting pregnant I feel would have a bigger impact than with Jane since Molly definitely has some trauma from Crawford not wanting kids. Unlike Jane, Molly was pretty damn smart like when she used the bells to lure the walkers.
Wow, you pretty much articulated my own thoughts about the illusion of choice in these games. The first season looks like it gives you lots of choice the first time around, and even after that it feels different on subsequent playthroughs due to the ways you interact with the characters. Season Two just... lets you reach the same outcome with four different buttons.
Know I'm late to this, but I wanna throw my two cents into this.... can we all agree Jane is horrible?
Like, I understand what she was meant to be - I can understand what they were going for, but my God, they fumbled the bag with the final episode and beyond with her. She's very much an evil character who pushes Kenny to the edge for the sake of... wanting to show who he truly is? And we know who Kenny is, he's a troubled character, he's not a perfect character, he's a man who's lost everything time and time again, and Jane tricks him into thinking one of the reasons to live died. Heck when you do shoot him, you get the chance to talk to him, and he apologizes, saying why... and it's heartbreaking. Or a joke, if you look at Two Best Friends Play playthrough where they just laugh and joke about it... they sided with Jane just to spite Kenny.
But regardless, regardless, Jane then expects Clem to smile and go "oh, you - oh you clever shrew!" when A.J is alive. And if you choose to stay with her? She commits suicide, dooming Clem and A.J if they were solely reliant on her because her dumbass decided unprotected sex is worth it when our group is endanger! (Good one Luke) or if you choose to abandon her, she performs a "I can't do this alone ;-; Clem I need you!" - then likely commits suicide anyway because of pregnency because dumbass of the year can't trick people good enough, and can't face the consequances of her actions! Seriously, if Jane and Luke were around, maybe Sarah could have lived longer! Maybe there wouldn't be as much panic, but no, Jane fucks. Leaves. Comes back. Become Darth Sidious/Palpatine and going, "He's going to hurt everyone Clem...", "Use my power, I beg you!" - "Unlimited Unprotected SEX!" - "Execute Order; Provoke the Man"
What does Kenny do if you seperate from him? He's.... he's understanding. He just - the moment he heards A.J cry, he says it'll be okay. That Clementine has him. She'll always have him. He doesn't do anything else... at Wellington, it's the same, he almost sacrifices his spot for them. And goes into the distance, by himself, but happily knowing they'll be safe... until Season 3 and "wow look Clem's here, Wellington got attacked lmao" Kenny does die due to B.S if you stay with him, I am still mad at a car crash. A car crash killed Kenny from the Walking Dead?! Which is why whenever I do play Season 2, always make sure Kenny blesses us now. I don't know what happens to him, but by god, I know he's okay.
Hi, year late.
I cannot tell you how frustrating it was when they wouldn't let me say "HE JUST BARGED IN, WTF WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO? I'M FIFTY POUNDS SOAKING WET!!!"
Thank you for bringing that up.
30:13 "Jane is overall a better carer for clementine"
Jane suicides and leaves Clem alone.
Kenny sacrafices himself and dies for Clem even though it's her fault that she crashed.
Yea, of course. "A better carer".
Besides it was never stated that Kenny was an abusive father to Clem during their time together after the 2nd season. There were no flashbacks about it, but there were about how Kenny motivated her and cared about her.
Kenny killed Carver (Guy who killed dozens) and beat up Arvo (Guy who killed Luke and could killed the whole Clem's group.) and Jane.
Jane stated that she couldn't save Kenny's baby. If you tell somebody that it's because of you their child died even in these peaceful times they will most likely kill you or beat you almost to death. Kenny, on the other hand, is a very damaged and broken person who's kid died once. Of course for him it would be even worse than for your average Joe. Why would Jane do that? Besides, Jane grabbed a knife, she could've used some other non lethal weapon. Jane is just a massive L choice.
I thought the first season made it clear that Larry wasn't racist, he just hated Lee because he knew he was a murderer
Interesting! I always thought he realised later
i should definitely replay this season, as it is my favorite, and i adore clementine as a protagonist, ESPECIALLY since she was so young. playing as a kid in an end-of-the-world scenario is so interesting and i kinda wished they expanded upon it more
I’ve never really noticed all these things… I think I’ve always just been blinded by how much I love Clementine.
I like this video but there are some things off. As in like… nuances. Larry doesn’t immediately hate Lee because he’s black (it probably doesn’t help though), he immediately hates him because he’s a convicted murderer.
Larry wasn't racist and he didn't dislike Lee because he was black. It was because he knew Lee was arrested/convicted for murder (a Senstor at that) thus felt he was a danger to the group.
I thought S2 was a mixed bag, I'm shocked to hear someone say the game wants you to side with Kenny because I never wanted to, I loved and missed him sure, but he was clearly dangerous, by the end he didn't even feel like the same character anymore so shooting him was a lot easier than the writers probably thought. The true dumpster fire was A New Frontier, IMO.
The kenny endings was 10x more satisfying than the Jane ones so yeah the writers clearly had a preference. That being said I think they went a bit overboard sometimes when showing his irrational tendencies.
kenny went extremely insane and thats quite realistic hence what hes been through
Jenny’s is a gigachad his ending is much better in my opinion
I think Innuendo studio's take is great. Where Kenny us effectively framed as an abusive stepfather. Someone you sympathize with and care for deeply, but who's actions are ultimately unforgivable. To me the most satisfying endng was killing kenny and then leaving Jane. Maybe it's unrealistic, but it felt more narratively satisfying. After all, Clem had already demonstrated greater emotional maturity than either of them. I loved Kenny but it was clear he was gone. And once the post-traumatic outbursts become properly violent, that's when they need to be stopped.
I think this type of "choose your own adventure" genre was a product of its time. It wasn't dynamic enough to provide realistic changes in the story be it due to development time or poor writing, and the feeling of group aggression felt artificial and forced.
Its sad because i don't think it had to be this way and despite kinda liking this game for me it goes down from here in other other two games in different ways.
I recommend checking out "The Wolf Among us" i think its approach to balancing being a murderous sociopath vs basic humanity and how people treat you carries over better in that game then these ones.
The Wolf Among Us and Tales From The Borderlands are the best telltale games tbh
AMOGUS
Telltales the walking dead walked so until dawn and the quarry could run
@@TheBlueLink3 TWD Season 1 felt more sophisticated and meaningful in its writing, concerning gameplay and the decisions, Until Dawn blows them out of the water. Not that it's perfect, but a lot cooler than what Telltale did.
@@TheBlueLink3 Maybe you're right, there are a lot of setpieces and scenarios you will reach in Until Dawn regardless of the decisions made along the way, but in general there are a lot more differences, be it in endings, small details, surviving characters etc. TWD becomes very disappointing in that regard on a second playthrough, especially when the game actively ignores your decisions and chosen dialogue options.
I’ve always loved how everyone gets different feelings and likes different characters in this series. Personally, I sided with Kenny most of the time. He is very useful and protective, that and my own nostalgia, not unlike Clem would have. The main issue with him is that he has no Lee, no one that would stand up to him and punch him in the face when he needed it, then have his back when he deserves it. Luke could only do the former, while Lee could do both.
I always felt the final fight should’ve been Luke Vs. Kenny. It doesn’t fit Jane’s character and I personally didn’t like her enough by that time to save her over Kenny. Luke and Kenny already had a rivalry going for them while Kenny and Jane were just prickly with each other. A simple bad situation could’ve been enough to set Kenny and Luke against each other. I feel it would’ve been more in place for there to be several endings for Luke, Kenny, and Jane. You could slip away with Jane and the baby, let Kenny kill Luke while Jane leaves, kill Kenny to save Luke, and also an ending where Jane and Luke stay with Clem and AJ, in a familial group, since Jane and Luke already had a fling. The choice would’ve been much harder for most, for me it would’ve been anyway.
As for everything else, this season was far more of a hit or miss for me than any other telltale game. There was things I liked, such as seeing the return of smaller characters such as the 400 days crew, and I really liked some of the new characters, but then there is the weak as hell overarching villain, the contrived writing, and the fact most of the story is pointless because of season 3.
Sorry I know I’m super late and this was a long ramble but I just wanted to put my thoughts out there, great video. Also, congrats on having Wendigoon as a viewer!
I had a thought and has to come back here to get on a soap box. Luke's death is so terrible. Not because 'he was the only one nice to us and we can't save him', but because the makers of the game thought it smart to insert their tough-girl-sona to stand there the whole time and tell you, "Nah, you can't save him." As though we hadn't already learned that you can't save ANYBODY in these games.
That's not a compliment on the futileness of survival, but instead an infuriating reminder that these games pretend your choices matter when they don't. I've seen CYOA books with a broader diversity of outcomes. It's not, "You can't save him", it's, "You can't save anyone, so stop trying because you're just wasting gameplay time."
And I bet the writers thought it was soooo deep to have a strong and independent woman talk directly to the player, reminding them "This is a really, REALLY serious situation and people are going to DIE because that's REAL LIFE." Yeesh, when did zombie games get so pretentious?
From my understanding, the original plan was to pit Luke and Kenny against each other and grow that until the finale where you have to choose between them. However, due to weird fan shipping going on between Clem and Luke, Jane was brought back in Episode 5 (after she left in 4) and was then reworked into growing conflict with Kenny in the final episode. I'd easily side with Luke or Jane against Kenny either way, but it's definitely annoying to see the seeds sewn in Episode 2-4 in regards to a Luke/Kenny feud just to have it undercut forcing Jane to stand-in.
Season 2 certainly did have a lot of problems, I think if it had more time in develoupment and if the workplace hadn't been so toxic it could have been great. I still like most of the characters and wish they'd gotten a better story. Sarah's death was the death that actually made me mad at the game.
While the themes you talked about are probably true, that's not what I got out of this game. The theme I got was 'You can't go back'
Basically, Clem wants to be around people. She wants a family like she had with her parents, like she had with Lee, but people are the real danger in this zombie apocolypse. If not from malice like Carver's, from selfishness like Jane's, or stubbornness like Kenny's, or petty bullshit like Bonnie's. For all of Jane's crap she did have one thing right. She talked about other people dragging Clementine down. In the end, I felt the game was saying that Clememtine was better off alone. (which is the ending I got when I shot Kenny and left Jane on the side of the road like the trash she is) Which sucks, but the whole world sucks.
I do think you're wrong about Kenny and Jane. Kenny is a dick and we see him disreguard the opinions/feelings of Katja and Marita in S1 and S2 but never in either game that I can recall (Or the brief glims of him from S3) do we ever see him intentionally laying hands on any of his loved ones. Not Duck, or any of them. Not that his and Clem's relationship would be 100% healthy but I genuinely don't see evidence of him becoming physically abusive. And, in my opinion, kicking the shit out of Arvo doesn't count towards that. Arvo was a piece of crap. Even if you don't steal from him he still brings his people to rob and probably kill the group. That's not to say Kenny was right hurting Arvo, but there's a huge difference between hurting someone in the group and hurting someone who tried to hurt you.
The game also tries to connect Kenny and Carver. Mike and Bonnie pretending that stealing all the groups supplies and running away was to get away from Kenny. Like he's as bad as Carver. But Kenny doesn't try to keep people with him. If he survives the fight with Jane and you tell him he's dangerous, he tries to send Clem and AJ away for their own saftey. If you reach Wellington, he prioritizes Clem and AJ's saftey and happiness over his own. Carver would NEVER do that. And neither would Jane.
As for Jane, you like to contribute some of her actions to writing decisions and while that's totally valid, that's not how I like to think of it. While there is a lot Jane could teach Clementine, she's a legitimately bad person imo. Jane's defining characteristic is her selfishness. It presents itself as self preservation most of the time but then she meets Clem. She attaches to Clem and wants Clem with her. So she contrives a scenario to get rid of the only person Clem has left. She puts a literal newborns life in danger with the express purpose of MAKING Clem kill Kenny. At any time she could have stopped the fight by telling the truth, but she didn't. The only reason I can think of is that she wanted Clem to kill Kenny. And honestly? I don't even think she indended to tell Clem about AJ. It wasn't until you hear AJ screaming that the truth comes out. And if we're being honest, if AJ was a real baby he would probably be dying. Jane is a manipulative, selfish person.
This isn't me intending to bash your video though, it's definitly well made and your points are certainly valid. :)
I absolutely HATE how the game tries to force you to like and sympathize with Kenny. I may be biased, since I hated him since episode 2 of season 1, but I think that in games like these it’s important to let the player make their own moral judgments of the characters and act upon them. It’s really unfair to present the player with what is supposed to be a morally gray, polarizing choice that ideally should be split 50/50, only to punish the player by giving them this terrible cobbled together ending made with purely reused assets if you choose to save Jane, meanwhile rewarding players for playing the way the devs wanted you to by having a fully fleshed out, narratively satisfying ending if you let Kenny MURDER SOMEONE. I would easily compare it to how LiS1’s ending is handled. You shouldn’t give your player an underwhelming, unsatisfying ending just because they chose an option you presented to them.
Completely agree! The game has a huge bias towards Kenny and it makes any other route feel very hollow and unrewarding
34:28 Larry isn’t necessarily racist, he’s just an asshole. He hates Lee because he knows he’s a murderer and therefore doesn’t trust him. He’s not exclusively nasty towards Lee though, he’s a dick to everyone. He never calls out Lee in any way based on race (unlike a character such as Nate in the 400 Days DLC who immediately asks Russell if he’s in a gang after meeting him).
#Justice4Larry
I wish the game actually made your choices matter, so you would be able to see what a partnership with lily and larry would have been like.
I don’t think ‘everyone hated’ this season at all I think it was very much liked and fairly criticised. I think the one that should be given the everyone hated titles would be season 3 cos that was widely disliked
It's so weird! Everyone I've spoken to about this season has hated it - to the point where I felt confident enough to name this video the title I did - but then I post it and loads of people really like it! Really rethinking my name now haha, it's not too late
@@MertKayKay hahaha I’ve only seen somewhat mild criticism and positivity about it although like you said at the beginning a lot of the criticism is with the writing and characters, and also due to lack of consequences with your choices. Super exited for the rest of the vid!
@@MertKayKay I think a part of the common view of season 2 is in part due to season 3 being so much worse and nostalgia. Nostalgia can make you forget the bad stuff
Season 2 actually tries to be lightly realistic for a post-apocalyptic zombie story and idiots who want every story to be a teen drama, say that "muh to many ppl died". Cmon👎
The writing for Sarah frustrates me because I can see what they were trying to do with her and how she could've been a really interesting character
Serah was ment to show what Clem could've become if Lee didn't have that talk with Chuck and didn't teach her how to survive even without him, if Carlos did the same with Serah she might have been able to survive. It's a really interesting parallel but what frustrates me is instead of focusing on it, the game treats Sarah like she's the Meg Griffin of The Walking Dead, constantly shitting on her even though she's literally a kid to the point that no matter what choices you make, Sarah will die in a really brutal way. The fact that apparently in a interview with the writers they revealed how much they disliked Sarah to the point where they were happy that she was killed off is really messed up and just sad
Just the amount of wasted potential with her frustrates me, like imagine if Jane were to die instead of Sarah at the museum's observation if you chose not to leave her behind, like imagine that she's the one that hid AJ from Kenny in fear that he might hurt him. The amount of untapped potential thrown out the window just so they could make her a walking punching bag
Fr I straight up wanted to throw hands with Jane every time she fought me on any of my decisions. I like to preserve life on any of my choose-your-own-adventure games like this. I didn't like how Kenny would attempt to use his past memories against you but my God hearing Jane open her mouth about anything had me siding with him whenever they would argue. By far the worst was the RV scene. I'm autistic and really related to Sarah; so I immediately recognized she was having a panic attack. I went down and applied anything I could use to get her out of it and to safety. Yet every time I felt as if I was getting somewhere that bitch would open her mouth and set my progress back tremendously. I wanted to sacrifice her so bad lol. The cherry-on-top was the museum balcony scene; wear I'm trying to secure the spot from walkers and she becomes trapped. I thought we were going to get a Molly character development scene where she would step up and, well, do something but she didn't. It was like watching a child, who knew there was a now or never ultimatum, then deliberately choosing to act malicious just to have an excuse to claim inaction. At that point whenever I could afterwards I wanted to have her killed. It left a bad taste in my mouth having to pick between her and Kenny; knowing I'd be picking my own poison. And the only ending that felt satisfying was to kill Jane and have Kenny drop Clementine and AJ off at Wellington; an actual safe-haven at the time.
People love hating on season 3 but season 2 is (my personal) worst by far.
I feel Sarah is heavily autistic coded. So the way the writers treated her and branded her a burden really sucks. She has the signs for it, and even her reactions to stress expresses it. Carlos practically confirms it too with his dialogue at the beginning.
Season 2 really feels like Abuse Apologia: The Game at times with its characterization and insistence upon you ignoring horrible patterns of behavior as Clem. Like you pointed out, Kenny gets viewed through rose-colored lenses despite the fact that he constantly shows signs of an abuser. What makes it insidious is how the game seems to want you to take the position of "...but he would never be like that to ME" as if that's ok or remotely reasonable to believe.
Very, very true! Couldn't shake that feeling no matter how many times I played it
Season two is my favorite 😭 A New Frontier is by far the worst one, it didn’t even have the “you and % of players”
Before i watch this video i have to say i fucking love this Season even with all it's flaws. It's unfinished and could have been better if they had more time but i can't help but enjoy it. The atmosphere, the dark tone, the great music, i really like the cabin crew especially Nick and Luke. All the emotional moments work for me and idk i just fuck wit the vibe. Coincidentally my friend and I are actually doing our own retrospective debate about the entire series on my other channel Christian Cryers, won't be out for a bit but if you wanna see me explain myself then go check out the channel. Sorry this wasn't meant to be a promo but TLDR i love Season 2 and all the legitimate criticisms probably won't change my mind even though it's fair to not like it.
If it helps, I definitely think that all the issues I had with this game came down completely to their budget/resource issue, which I do talk about in this video :D So not necessarily the game itself, but more as a symptom of bad management.
@@MertKayKay That's a perfectly valid criticism and even i admit it needed way more time in the oven before being released.
I cant wait for your take one season 3 and 4!!!!
I actually quite liked Sarah and wish they did more with her, like how duck and clem had a few moments together... I remember in the season 1 you saw clem and duck draw together, and the dialogue of clem putting a bug on ducks pillow always makes me laugh. They could've made Clem and Sarah talk about stuff, maybe take pictures because Sarah really liked doing that.
They definitely missed an oppurtunity there and they made clem feel too grownup like. I get she is hardened from all that shes been through but they could've kept her love for drawing.I dont think they ever made her draw after the 1st game.
One your right! The following seasons writers forgot that Clem likes to draw
You made some very good points. TBH if it wasn't for Kenny I wouldn't have liked this season that much since I never cared for the cabin group (Nick, Sarah, Carlos). It's a shame that Mike, Bonnie, Arvo, and the 400 days cast were thrown into the forgotten characters list.
To be honest I feel like most of the conflict with Kenny in season two is so contrived just for the sake of building up tension and you can obviously tell that the original plan was to have Luke be the one to fight Kenny in episode five especially with the foreshadowing in episode two. Swapping him out for Jane was just a bad idea especially since for me she’s an annoying asshole. I distinctly remember on my first Playthrough when she was whining in the car I was like “Ok bitch you are dying the first chance I get”. I know they’re an absolute piece of shit character can work but season two doesn’t realise how much of a piece of shit she is. Say what you will about Chloe in life is strange but the story is aware that she can be a piece of shit at times and gives her justifiable reasons for being that way.
if I'd had to choose between Luke and Kenny I would have been panicking while THAT timer ran out. xD
seriously, and we'd just met Jane a couple of episodes before. give me the gutpunch of the unstable but beloved parental figure vs. your best friend who is trying his best.
"Hated by everyone" is a bit of a wishful thinking, but yeah, I see where you're coming from.
I remember playing it at launch and quite liking it, but around episode 4 I had an unpleasant realisation:
This series became totally affected by the curse of the original graphic novel - it's just a bunch of meandering survival for survival sake without any strong thematic hook now. Season one wasn't like that at all. And season 4 is not like that too, thankfuly.
I wouldn't say "wishful" thinking because that comes off as spiteful 🤣
I feel the better theme for this season would be about how kids reflect on things, Clementine reflecting the need for survival and as a child, the need for others. Sarah is the opposite of that and the consequences for it. and AJ being a blank canvas
I feel an interesting Idea that they could've made with Sarah was that if you helped her and were honest she would have gone back to clementine in the scene with Jane and Kenny knocking one of them out with something
I’ve always loved season 2 as my absolute favorite. It’s the first time we can truly control Clem and shape her story. A new frontier was riddled with missing content and suffered for not including clementine right from the start.
ANF had missing content? I need to read more about this
@@MertKayKay at first I didn’t like a new frontier but now looking back years later I’ve grown to like it. I always shot Conrad originally but after choosing to spare him the whole story basically changed and gabe was more tolerable. I just feel like ANF had so much more potential
Larry was racist?
I kinda thought he treated Lee like that cuz he knew he killed someone before the zombies and kinda why he doesn't act like that with Clementine and even wanting to protect Clementine along with his daughter
Yea, she pulled that part out of her ass. She acted like he called Lee a slur. If she wanted something to say about Larry it would be about the "Homo Parade" line, but he never called Lee anything other than saying that he knew that Lee was a convicted murder. They always gotta make it about race
The last thing I expected from you in this review is saying Jane was a good role model lmao. She's anything but
B)
Wait I thought season 2 was universally loved. I've only ever heard good things about it. It's where we saw the rise of badass Clementine. It was season 3 that got panned everywhere I looked.