Warning: Spoilers
There will be spoilers for Red Dead Redemption in this post and I don’t want anyone having the later stages of the game ruined because I wasn’t clear about that fact.
So… where to start… Okay so I’m very close to finishing the game, but before I get to that I’ll go back a bit. I went to Mexico and helped out there for a while, waiting to get info on two members of my old crew. I had to do missions for both the Mexican government - a bureaucracy filled with drunken insane rapists and murderers - as well as having to do missions for the rebels uprising against said government.
Mexico was interesting for me because it was by far my favourite of the landscapes, and the music is excellent there too, the missions were amongst the most irritating. I found it very frustrating to have to play through doing quests for both sides of this uprising, never being given a choice as to who I would support, whilst both sides jerked me around with regards to information, for quite a while until finally the government were going to kill me and then I’m fully on the rebels side. I really liked Landon Ricketts quests as he was a pretty awesome character, but Luisa was very fatalistic and irritating. Her refusal to see how much of an ass Reyes was was frustrating, and then having to do quests with that idiot was really annoying. I’m glad I got to kill De Santa and Allende, though, that was fun. Luisa dying was quite sad, but in a way I think she would have been less happy should she have made it through the rebellion alive.
Tall trees is also nice looking, however the music there is so annoying that I soon want to be out of the place. That ominous, tense, single piano key twanging soundtrack was a bad idea, in my opinion.
So, now onto the meat of things. Disposing of Dutch was… well a little unsatisfying. There wasn’t as large a build up to his death as there was with Bill, and in the end John doesn’t kill him, which I found frustrating. I would have shot that psychopath in an instant, even taking into account the history he had with Marston.
Getting back to my very own ranch was just awesome, and doing a few minor quests for Abigail was fun, as well as seeing them interact. The Jack quests were alright and I liked the way John handled Jack’s misbehaviour when running of to hunt a bear. Nice writing there.
The scene where John is gunned down by a large posse of Ross and his crew was… poignant. I felt like the writing was good, the story made sense, and I was very sad to see John go that way. He deserved better. So now I’m running around as Jack, after Abigail has died some ten years or so after John, and I’ve found out that there is a quest to kill Ross, so I’ll gladly be taking that on!
However running around as Jack is rather irritating. His voice is childish and overly chipper, in spite of how they’ve tried to make him look in his older state. This kid has lost his father to a corrupt government, and he’s recently lost his mother, his last family on earth, and yet you pass a rider on a track and Jack’ll greet them with an upbeat ‘Howdy, Mister’.
So all in all I’d give the game a 9.5 out of ten, it really is a masterpiece and gives me great hope for where Rockstar may go in the future. I’ve respected this game on every level, graphics, music, story line, game play, it’s all here!
Now I was going to talk about a call from my real estate agent about that overseas property investment in Philippines that I was considering a while back, but good lord this post has gotten too long to do that now! The Philippines is going to have to wait!
