So, I’m now on chapter 3 of my second playthrough of Red Dead Redemption 2 and I finally feel like it’s time for a breakdown of why this game is so amazing.
Obviously, spoilers ahead, read at your own risk.
Now, I LOVED the first game. John was such a captivating character back then, he genuinely seemed like a good person who did some bad things in his life and wanted to make it right. It was a fucking brilliant game.
But this one took what the first game gave us and expanded on it a million times over.
After finishing Arthur’s story in RDR2, I was emotional, I was devastated, I found myself actually mourning him. I didn’t WANT to play as John. I wanted Arthur back.
I felt the same way at the end of RDR1 when you play as Jack. I didn’t want to play as Jack, I wanted John back. But it was for a completely different reason.
John Marston was a character you do learn to love in the first game, but I can’t say I ever felt an emotional connection to him. He was likeable, but he was pretty surface level for most of the game. When he died at the end, I wasn’t emotional. I thought I had fucked up and got him killed and freaked out a bit, but I can’t say I was overly sad. The reason I didn’t want to play as Jack was, well, Jack wasn’t a very likeable character, in either game, in my opinion.
In RDR2, I went in knowing I loved John Marston, and having a new character measure up would be tough, but I was fucking WRONG.
Arthur Morgan is one of the most amazing characters any game has ever had. Now that I’ve restarted it, I realized that Arthur wasn’t overly likeable at the beginning of the game. He’s pretty gruff, bitter, angry, and aggressive. He doesn’t seem like a particularly “good” person. But as the game goes on, you learn more about him. You see his softer side, you see how much he loves animals, his friends, even how good he is with Jack. You see his flaws, his insecurities, his personal struggles. He’s relatable. You read through his journal and see his real feelings about everything that happend. He looks at himself in the mirror and calls himself ugly and you feel that, because we’ve all been there. He tells Lenny he never married because no one would have him, and you feel it, because who HASN’T thought that? He sees his ex and you see the wash of confusing emotions he feels and you GET IT. You watch him go through the game and be torn over protecting the people he loves, or being loyal to the man who raised him, and you watch him make choices that show what a great person he is underneath the hard exterior you saw at the beginning, and you fall in love with him.
By the time Chapter 6 started, I was so emotionally attached to Arthur, that I was completely heartbroken at his diagnosis. I felt cheated, I felt robbed, I felt like it was so unfair to doom him that way, even if I had a feeling that it likely wouldn’t be his actual cause of death in the end. As he gets sicker and sicker, I found myself being more and more anxious about the end. I was constantly worried that he’d drop dead any second, that every gunfight I got into would be the last. I was googling ways to cure him, to hold off the sickness, anything to fix it. His final goodbye to Abigail and Sadie had me in tears, the way he comforted his horse through its last few breaths had me actually saying “oh my god” out loud and crying, and his moment with John at the end left me an absolute wreck. Thankfully, I had the honorable ending, so it was a (slightly) more peaceful death, but watching him die absoltely destroyed me. I was bawling, I was not okay, I had to put the game down and collect myself before I continued on with the epilogue because I couldn’t believe that it was the end for Arthur.
Playing as John felt so hollow after that. I wanted to be excited that it was him again, but even in RDR2, John just didn’t have the heart that Arthur did. It felt empty. Even something that was so insignificant about Arthur, like the way he calmed his horse when it was agitated, seemed so heartfelt and you knew he really loved his horse, and I felt like when John calmed his horse it didn’t seem like he really cared about it at all? He just didn’t want to lose control of it. The only point where I was invested in the John chapters, was the end, when you finally avenge Arthur’s death. But again, it was because of Arthur. John is wearing his hat and it feels like things are coming full circle finally.
I could make an entire other post about the rest of the characters that made this game so amazing… Charles, Hosea, Sean, Sadie, Javier, LENNY… But I’ll save that for another time.
RDR2 is easily the best game I have ever played. And that’s coming from someone who has had the same favorite game for the last 7 years (Skyrim, obvi). This has taken over, and I never thought that would happen. No game has ever had me so emotional, or so invested in what happens.
