Another army morphine case? :gah:

Stanley gets promoted to Homicide and partners with Rusty. :thumbsup:

Spoilerized for both content and length, and this is no way is a thought-out dissection of the game's storytelling, just a rant.

We have a main character that knows and does things we're not privy to nor is he portrayed in a way for us to be empathetic. It makes no sense to play a close third person game and not concretely know (as one example) that your character had sex with Elsa when he went over to her apartment the first time. He yelled at his wife (who we never met until after then) about how she doesn't understand what he's been going through, but we don't know what he's been going through. We see flashbacks to the war, but they're not from his perspective, they're from this great omnipotent perspective. So the suffering that he's going through, becoming "more human" as Elsa later puts it, we don't see or get to experience. I felt more empathy and likeability for Kelso in the first scene when Elsa comes to him for help.

The game sets up storytelling rules and then breaks them but not for logical or needed reasons. Why after 18 chapters of a 21 chapter story do we completely change our main character? I understand in some games or stories or movies, a main character has a friend/sidekick/robot that can do things or have a special tactic that the main character can't do and so we briefly follow that special side mission, but it doesn't make sense here. Nowhere along the way has the rules of the game setup switching characters. The irony is, while the switch to Kelso put another nail in the coffin of bad storytelling, it did finally get me to emotionally invest in the main character (now being Kelso.) Fish out of water, attractive lady, a mystery afoot. But it wasn't necessary. The story should have Phelps investigating on his own time, or have been a story about Kelso all along. And to the rules end, also, why do we have the crime scene/new crime scene flashback in the last chapter. They've never done anything like that and it serves no logical or plot purpose to do it that way.

And if you are giving us all the omnipotent war flashbacks why give us the post-credit scene after the credits? The flashbacks make us hate Phelps, the main story and the way he is as a cop mostly makes us hate Phelps, but we also have no emotional connection to the GIs that this story revolves around. They all sort of seem like dicks anyways. But if you start with the final scene, show them coming back to shit lives, wanting to help their fellow GIs, at least then we're invested in wanting to help them, make sure Cohen and Fontaine and all the bad guys don't off our trying to make do soldiers.

I got all the clues and questions right, had little city damage (I don't even know when it happened) and yet I only ended up with 3 stars. As with the first time I played it, I thought the evidence against the husband was stronger so I charged him, but do I have to charge the child molester?