Dealing with backlog: Red Dead Redemption 2

Once again I'm the last person to the party! xD 

I watched Toni play it when it was first released because it wasn't announced for PC at first. So I wasn't sure I'd get to play it. With the result that I knew the broad strokes of the story going in. 

Being mostly used to RPG games, this game offered a few initial challenges. Like I couldn't find anywhere in the game (even in the help section) that told me how specifically to raise my HP and so struggled for a while with Arthur dying every time he met an enemy... Until I properly figured out the take cover mechanic and the dead eye. 

Aside from the initial hiccup in learning mechanics, the most continuously annoying thing was steering the goddamn horse, and I don't know if it's just poorly implemented on PC or what. But usually the horse was steered by moving the mouse (similar to the stick on a controller I assume), with nudges in either direction being possible with the A and D keys. All okay. Except if I entered the map while the horse was moving or otherwise paused the game, when I'd return to the game the A and D keys wouldn't nudge in any direction but just cause the horse to do full 90 degree turns, which more than once caused me to fall off a mountain or off a bridge. And if I was driving a coach or a wagon the mouse wouldn't steer at all, but it was exclusively the WASD. After spending so many hours on horseback steering with the mouse, it was always jarring to suddenly not be able to do that. 

I decided early on that I'd do my best to 100% the game, and not just what the game considered 100%, but what I considered 100%. So I did all the camp upgrades and all the trapper clothing. I completed the compendium and every entry in the compendium is at 100%, including horses, fish and plants. I did every treasure trail and every challenge, every stranger quest and every honor mission. And most of the time I had a blast. 

Some animals have a really unfair spawn rate though. I struggled for ages to find a moose with horns until one time I was at Wallace Station paying off a bounty and then just turned around the the moose was just standing there behind me. I've never pulled out my rifle so quickly. The American Robin for the Hunting Delivery was a bastard to find too, until I found a guaranteed spawn point at Ringneck Creek in Lemoyne. The Guarma-specific animals were surprisingly not too difficult, but nothing had me tear my hair out like the Carolina Parakeet. omg I wanted to call it quits so many times, but my stubbornness won out every time and I reloaded my save just one more time, just one more time, just one more time... Until I finally found the goddamn green bird so I could study it and then shoot the fucker to oblivion. Nothing was as annoying as the parakeet. Not the hunting deliveries, not the gambling challenges, not even Algernon's exotics quests. Fuck those birds.

I had a lot of fun trying to find all the secrets and easter eggs in the game. Two of my favourites were the vampire in Saint Denis and the Witches' Cauldron up in Ambarino :3

I hated Micah from the start. That first line out of his mouth and I wanted the game to give me a reason to hurt him. My feelings toward Dutch were more chaotic. The first two chapters I believed he was trying his best, but from chapter three onwards it gradually became obvious that he had no idea what he was doing and was just making it up as he went along. "I got a plan", sure you do, buddy. I've read fan theories that Dutch lost his marbles when he hit his head in chapter four, but the more I played the more I came to believe what John says in the epilogue to be true; which is that Dutch's real character was coming out after years of carefully hiding it. He's a narcissistic egotistical asshole and always has been. 

I cried a bit at the end of chapter six, even though I knew it was coming.

Building a home with John in the epilogue was a nice change of pace from the rest of the game and I really enjoyed it. 

Still kinda pissed the rdr1 remaster wasn't ported to PC.