Season 2 has gotten quite a lot of unfair criticism IMO
Now I say some of the criticism is completely reasonable, but I also feel a lot of it isn't. I said some of this in a post, but I feel it warrants a thread discussion.
Sequals in any form are difficult. Whether it be games, movies or TV shows , it will always be hard to match the original, especially if it is held in such a high regard. Season 2 had to do be very different from the first, it couldn't fall into the trap of copying everything that Season 1 did so well, otherwise people would have complained that it was too similar. Since you changed it up a bit people have complained about certain things. No matter what Telltale did, it was impossible for them to please everybody. Telltale doesn't have the largest amount of time, or the largest budget to do a lot of things people want them to do.
Despite a few problems this season may have had, they still did a lot of things right. The had an amazing soundtrack, atmosphere and Clementine has become one of the most consistent and well evolved characters I have ever seen in any form of media. All in all, Telltale was still able to create a super intense emotional story that I will never forget. I think Season 2 will be looked back on stronger by the time Season 3 rolls around. I remember Season 1 getting a lot of flack online as well, but after awhile people stopped complaining and it is now held in such a high regard.
Again I totally see where some of you guys are coming from and I do agree with some of the criticisms. Let's hope Telltale can take the things they did really well in Season 2, and combine it with some of the valid criticisms people have, and help make Season 3 better than ever.
Also I hate to keep prefacing this, but this is just my opinion. I'd hate to sound like I'm trying to speak for everyone (because I'm not). So please let's try and have a civil discussion and not tear each others heads of haha.
Comments
While I admit the season had flaws, I have to agree. I enjoyed each episode throughly and never thought about most "poorly done" things until I went online and saw like fifty complaining threads.
Well I agree with your sentiment - all of the positives you mention are spot-on. And yes, it is always difficult to please people with sequels. That's very true and yes impossible to please everyone too. That doesn't nessesarily mean the criticism is unfair. I don't always agree with all of it but I can see how much of it is valid and I have my own criticisms too. Maybe it's just that it would be nice if it was balanced out with more praise which is absolutely deserves.
I think season 2 is fantastic in many ways and has so many powerful moments. It is a real achievement.
I will say they did a great job making me really feel changing emotions at times. A great example would be in Amid the Ruins. I was disgusted at the Nick death. Sad at the Sarah death at how pathetic it was. Happy when I saw baby AJ. Incredulous at Jane and Luke. Worried and slightly irritated at Kenny's mental state and just plain depressed at Rebecca's death and how she died holding AJ. I just wanted to turn off my game at that point.
I'll admit Season 2 had flaws, but Season 1 did too. but I still enjoy them both greatly.
Oh I absolutely agree! What I meant to get across, is criticism that is really not Telltales fault, in the sense that due to time constraints and not having a billion dollar budget, they were unable to really do, if you get what I mean haha. (Sorry guys, I'm not the greatest with putting thoughts into words)
I thought season 1 was near perfect but season 2 had me second guessing some decisions Telltale has made. I feel like there was some lack of character development in S2 since i wasn't really attached to any of the characters except maybe a few and i don't think S2 delivered on the feels department as much as S1, but i guess not much can top that off.
But overall i am satisfied with both seasons and looking forward to season 3 along with the upcoming GoT and Tales.
LEEFORSEASON3THATWILLMAKEITPERFECTLEE&LUKE!
Season 2 may not have had the same qualities as Season 1, but it delivered a good story. Clementine and Kenny's coming of age as characters from S1 to S2 was well done.
That's fair.
But what you said kind of goes back to my point with sequels sometime being very difficult if the first is held in such a high regard. It is sometimes harder to get emotionally invested in newer characters when you become so attached to the older ones. It also doesn't help that Season 1 did almost everything under the sun to get the player all emotional. If Season 2 had just copied that formula, than people would have been (rightfully) upset, that they just did the same thing twice. That is why Season 2 had to find different ways to manipulate our emotions. They had to up the intensity, which I feel they did very well, in order to counteract the fact they couldn't get us as emotional as before.
Nick and Sarah
That's to the fault of Telltale. They easily could have given characters like the Cabin Group a greater importance just by letting us walk around and talk to them. It was the strength of the first season and made us care about different characters. Bringing back Kenny was also a large flaw as it severely hindered the Cabin Group's development. And with Kenny back, who cares about the Cabin Group?
Great point. At first I didn't really care all that much about the Cabin Group. It wasn't until Amid The Ruins to where I finally started to really care about them and their characters. I thought Lukes character felt a bit forced in the beginning, he felt like a generic good-guy character. I was so happy when we caught him with Jane, as he finally seemed to be a real human, and not a robot.
You make an interesting point about Kennys resurgence being a hindrance on the Cabin Groups development. Which I can agree that it could have easily been solved, if they had given us more time in Episode 3 to just communicate with them. That's where I felt, as strong as the story was in both episodes, the writing for the rest of the group felt inconsistent in episode 3,4. It felt like Nick Breckon had things set up excellently in Episode 1,2 only for it to sort of dip for awhile, before picking back up in Episode 5. That's why I think the Fire Scene was so strong in Episode 5, because we finally had a chance to bond with the characters.
The problem with S2 for me is that they kept rewriting the story mid season. It was obvious to me that they wrote Kenny in for fan service. It ruined Carlos's character which i really enjoyed. Don't get me wrong I love Kenny's character, however i don't think it was worth bringing him back so the best he could hope for is "determinant" status. We all know what that means. The original Story imo would of been better, Carlos vs Jane/Luke and you either shoot Carlos in front of Sarah, or don't.
Thanks Telltale.
Like others have said above, though this Season had it's own problems, I still enjoyed it all the way through.
if S2 had more hubs similar to the campfire in ep5 in the earlier episodes that would help me connect with the group more, but the game was very linear and was always on the move. So i can't say that i cared too much for their deaths either besides Luke from the cabin group. Also i was surprised how badly they handled Nicks death in ep4, it's like his voice actor couldn't show up after ep3 so they just off-ed him. And yea Kenny pretty much hijacked the spotlight.
How do you know that was their original intention? I mean with Carlos.
Never even thought of Carlos as a potential main character like that. It would have been an interesting dynamic.
Also, I'm on the same boat in thinking the main story-ark was re-written in episode 3. I always felt they were heading a different way than they were. I could be wrong though
I like this season a lot too, and I hate how many people are super nit picky in these episodes. But I do have to agree with the criticisms in episode 4 however. After looking back on it, that episode could've been WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY better.
ignore
In ep 2, Luke says that Carlos won't do anything not nice, possibly alluding to a former role in the story. When Carver takes over at the Ski Lodge, Carlos is incredibly disrespectful.
Cue Kenny coming in who probably did what Carlos did for the sake of shitty fanservice.
And then Carlos became gone for the majority of ep 3.
I thought it was still great for what its worth. I knew long beforehand that it would never match up to season 2 soon as I heard that we'd take on Clementine as the main character. The atmosphere just would not be the same with the different yet interesting new perspective of a child's point of view. People often always try to compare it to the masterpiece season 1 was and when it doesn't match up they down it as some sort of trash. Happens with a lot of series except for franchises like the Sam Raimi Spiderman 1 and Spiderman 2 films. Many say the sequel was either equivalent in quality or surpassed the original movie and often times by the time they get to number three the idea gets kind of stale and weakened unless they have some different concept to introduce and spice things up.
I believe all stories are like chewing gum that begins strong and flavorful yet eventually looses its flavor in due time. Also like the AVGN once said. "People like to complain" its the truth and its also true that you can't please absolutely everybody. No matter how good or great something might be. There will always be someone somewhere that did not like or approve of the content. Some folks didn't like Season 1 of The Walking Dead game just as some surely didn't like other commonly accepted critical classics by the likes of Jurassic Park, The Dark Knight movie or The Lion King for example.
Season 2 of Walking Dead, was still great in spite of some imperfections. More than season 1 might I add, but not too bad. And as AVGN once said. "People like to complain" (Even though the ones that complain where probably the same that demanded and begged for more continuation of the series) Like if Wolf Among Us ever gets a season 2, I'm sure plenty would down that once its completed. So even if Season 2 (walking dead) was on par with the masterpiece season 1 was. There would always be someone somewhere that didn't like it or approve of the content. As will be the case with season 3.... and 4 If they ever get that far.
i think the problems of season two all come from the choice of making clementine the protagonist of season two, it was said well in a PC gamer review that a child protagonist "can't be both powerful and believable at the same time" telltale went with powerful and the unbelievability of it all just ruined the story and made it a childish power fantasy.
THIS. So much. Although in Season 1 Sean Vanaman never wrote every episode. (1, 3 and 5) There was a concise effort to continue the same themes and threads he had created. The guys who picked up 3 and 4 in Season 2 seemed to completely disregard Nick Breckon's ideas, thus shoving the Cabin Group aside (seen strongly in 3, through Carlos and Nick) By the time Breckon picked up 5, his threads involving the Cabin Group were gone because they were all dead. Such a shame.
Nick's voice actor (Brian Bremer) isn't even credited since he says nothing. He only grunts when he is shot and that's it for Nick. It's just a waste of great potential and sloppy writing in consistency in Ep. 3 and 4 imo...
.
It was good, the problem is that it's very obvious that it got re-written mid-way through and it leaves you feeling like whatever they intended to do at first would have been better, I personally have always thought that Kenny is an asshole so changing it to focus on Kenny kinda irked me, I really wanted to know what Carlos would do, though personally I would have preferred they focused more on Sarah, I liked Sarah a lot, I thought you were going to have to teach her how to survive while trying to deal with her anxiety but instead we get Kenny being a mopey asshole again, which was disappointing.
Again it's good but it would've been better if it focused more on the new characters instead of Kenny, because almost all of them had a lot of potential and really deserved a chance to shine like Kenny did on Season 1, because like him or not he was great on the first season.
This game can have problems depending on ones perspective of how you take the story with one person hating on this game having completely different reasons than another person complaining, but that being said no game is perfect. People will whine about character deaths, Clem (a child) being the main character, or how people don't like the consequences to their choices and that's fine, but it's your opinion not fact about what went wrong with season 2 and that it's bad writing.
This is Telltale's game (an amazingly successful indie company) and in the end they decide what's going to be in this game and if your here talking about it, then they did their job to entertain you. I just hope that the people that do have a problem with this season can look back and remember more good things about this game than the bad.
"telltale went with powerful and the unbelievability of it all just ruined the story and made it a childish power fantasy."
Ruined the story? It's a video game set in a zombie apocalypse setting... It's not real. The things you are complaining about are exactly why I like Video Game. Games are able to tell these powerful, emotional stories that events in real life aren't able to.
I think this Season will age better with time.
Ocarina of Time was held on the highest pedestal possible. The sequel Majoras Mask was left in the dust. It wasn't until the last few years, that game got the praise it deserved. Many people like it more than Ocarina of Time. The same with Season 1. I remember so much bitching when the Season had just ended, and after awhile people just stopped complaining.
Like you, some of the criticism was right.
But as a whole, a thoroughly enjoyed playing Season 2 and while its not as good as Season 1, it came extremely close to being so.
Good job, Telltale!
omg I loved those games and I agree give it time and this game will age like fine wine.
Yeah, I know about those scenes. However, it doesn't really tell me or indicate that Carlos was supposed to have a role similar to Kenny. Especially since TellTale hinted that Kenny would return waaayyy before the first episode of Season 2 came out. There's a good chance they didn't even have Carlos' character developed or even conceived yet when they were working on writing Kenny in season 2.
I don't doubt that they probably did have something else plan for Carlos along with a few rewrites, but if they did plan on him being as equally important as Kenny, then they would have had him play a more prominent role from the outset. Even more so than Luke.
but the only thing that is meant to be a fantasy is the zombies, the rest is supposed to be about real people.
sure i like games because they can be about anything, but if the premise is supposed to be about real people in a fantasy setting (like the walking dead is supposed to be) it ruins the tone if the people are unbelievable, and just makes the whole thing kind of silly