South Park: The Fractured but Whole

This game picks up where 2014's The Stick of Truth left off, so let's go ahead and do the same. Right out of the gate, it's immediately the same type of game, filled with twenty years of South Park humor and references wrapped around some classic, basic JRPG elements. My biggest complaint about The Stick of Truth was that its core gameplay was very limited; you could only fight battles with one ally at a time, rather than a full blown party of four or five, and the move-sets were sort of basic and repetitive and didn't really lead to any interesting strategies. The Fractured but Whole heard all of these complaints, apparently, and completely revamped the battle system. Now you can fight alongside three other party members using a diverse array of attacks and commands. It made the game so much better, not only because of the added customization and scope, but because of all the mid-battle conversations that happen between various party members. Like, why play a South Park video game at all if not to hear the chatter between Stan and Wendy, Kyle and Cartman, or Tweak and Craig? It's the little things, you know?

Unfortunately, the game's not simply and clearly an improvement over its predecessor, because the story here is just... a mess! Not only did the first game have the benefit of coming first and setting the bar, but it actually delivered a fairly tight narrative with some side quests inspired by almost two decades of South Park lore and mythology. You're briefly abducted by aliens, one night; you head to Canada for a half hour of gameplay, and it's rendered in glorious 8-bit shittiness; you end up in Mr. Slave's ass, heeding the wisdom of the Sparrow Prince. This game just has less of a repertoire to work from, having already cherrypicked from the "greatest hits" last time around, so it's largely a combination of new stuff (Tweak and Craig are dating, PC Principal is here to call out microaggressions) and some of the lesser lore of old, like Dr. Mephesto's obsession with genetically engineering four-assed animals. The whole thing never really congeals into a story, as much as a sporadic assortment of quests, and when I hadn't beaten the game after squaring off with a Cthulhu-style monster in the basement of a police station - by far the most involved battle in the game - I was wondering what the hell the game had in store for an ending. It was... very weak, to say the least - just a gauntlet of time traveling paradoxes, each of them only adding layers of confusion and chaos to an otherwise pretty well-designed world. In this respect, it was a lot like South Park episodes and seasons - chock-full of good ideas, but completely petering out at the end, the writers' inability to craft a satisfying closure just completely, nakedly on display for the world to see in a finished product.

Oh well! This was still a ton of fun to play, to the point where I scored the old 100% completion metric, platinum trophy (or Xbox One equivalent) and all. I spent probably 25 hours on what's ostensibly a 15-hour game, and that's not nothing!