Red Dead Redemption 2, Part 2

In my last post, I was 60 hours into Red Dead Redemption 2 and thought I was getting close to the end. Well I was, but it took me another 30 hours to get there, in part thanks to a two-part epilogue. All-in, it took me 93 hours to roll the credits. I didn’t finish everything, but by the end I was ready to move on. I have some completionist tendencies, but in this case I’m not tempted to hunt down all the trophies. I think it would actually be more interesting to play through again, knowing what I know now, rather than trying to 100% it.

Now that I’ve had some time to reflect, I have a few more thoughts on the game. I’m going to keep this relatively spoiler-free, although if you want to go in completely blind, feel free to skip this post.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)

Completed

In broad strokes, this game is a masterpiece of storytelling, world-building, and character development. The game follows the Van der Linde gang as they navigate the changing landscape of the American frontier in the late 1800s. The protagonist is Arthur Morgan, whose character development is nothing short of remarkable. Watching Arthur’s journey unfold, from his unwavering loyalty to the gang to his personal growth and redemption, really affected me and how I played the game. Being an outlaw is fun at the start of the game, but as the story progresses and the gang’s situation becomes more dire, you start to see the consequences of your actions. The game does a great job of making you feel the weight of your decisions.

At the beginning, there are a lot of gang members and it’s hard to keep them all straight. But over time, you get to know them all, and each one goes through their own character arc. The game does a great job of making you care about them.

The game is filled with memorable moments and missions that will stick with me for a long time. Rockstar did a great job at combining both the open-world exploration and the story missions into a cohesive experience. The world is full of interesting things to see and do, and the story missions are varied and engaging. It is a very cinematic game, whether in a cutscene or just riding your horse across the landscape. The music is also fantastic, and really sets the mood for the game.

I have some complaints, but honestly they feel pretty minor compared to the scope of the game. The biggest one is that the chapter set on Guarma felt unnecessary; I would have preferred if they had relocated that section of the game to the otherwise unused New Austin region somehow. I ended up wandering around there during the epilogue, wondering why it was even on the map. If the Guarma section was spent in New Austin, it would have tied everything together and given a reason to explore that region. As is, I feel like I wasted some time in both Guarma and New Austin with nothing to show for it.

It’s also a masterpiece of emergent gameplay and open world design. The map isn’t littered with stars for you to chase, but instead you’ll stumble upon interesting things as you explore. Instead of forcing you to do things, the game lets you take the lead and decide what you want to do. There is a ton of optional content that you can choose to engage with or ignore—or you might not even know it’s there. For example, I didn’t care much for playing the minigames, so I skipped them. But I did enjoy the side missions and random encounters, so I sought those out whenever they popped up.

Another example: I typically went to bed early instead of staying up with the gang around the campfire, and apparently there’s some conversations, songs, and character development that I missed out on. Instead of the FOMO that I sometimes get from other games, for some reason skipping content doesn’t bother me in Red Dead Redemption 2. I think the reason comes back to the emergent game play making me feel like whatever course I chart through the game is the right one.

If you play long enough you can start to see the systems at work, and the places where they start to break down. But that’s to be expected in game of this size. Most games aren’t even trying to do what Red Dead Redemption 2 does, so I’m willing to overlook some of the rough edges.

Regarding the ending: I won’t spoil anything, but I will say that I found it to be a fitting end to the story. The narrative pace really picks up towards the end, in an interesting contrast to the slow pace of the rest of the game.

And that brings us to the epilogue. (Again, I’m being vague to avoid spoilers.) At first, I found it a little anticlimactic the way it picked up after the end of the main story. But as I played through it, it grew on me and I came to appreciate it in its own way. In the main game I played Arthur as honorably as I could, so I took the opportunity in the epilogue to try the opposite. It was fun to see the other side of the morality system and didn’t have any real consequences.

The epilogue feels mostly there to tie everything back to the original game, Red Dead Redemption. I haven’t played that game yet, but my interest is piqued after playing through the epilogue. My understanding is that there are some parallels between the two games, but it was mostly lost on me.

Games can be a powerful narrative medium, and this game is a great example. It’s a long and slow game, but in many ways, the payoff wouldn’t work without the pacing. If you, like me, have been hesitant to start this game due to its length or the hype surrounding it, I cannot recommend it enough.