In the summer of 2010, I spent warm nights immersed in the word of Red Dead Redemption. It was a game I hadn't originally been excited for, having been underwhelmed by its predecessor, Red Dead Revolver for the original Xbox. My brother and my dad had been playing it, and to me it looked like Grand Theft Auto on horseback. At this point in my life, I had played GTA's sandbox to death, but had never completed a single one because I found the story unengaging.

Red Dead's story, however, clicked with me. The tale of John Marston's fall, and rise, and fall again, gripped me in a way GTA's over-the-top gangs, drugs, and elaborate power fantasies had failed. I left that game feeling extremely satisfied, and regarded it as one of the greatest games I had ever played.

I'm not the only person who felt this way, judging from the acclaim the game got. Red Dead Redemption 2 took nearly 8 years to come to fruition, so the hype was understandably huge.

Cowboy blues

A boy and his dog

I'll admit right here I bought the game when it released, and played it several hours before shelving it for an entire year. The first few hours of Red Dead Redemption II spend a lot of time getting you acquainted with a world you're already probably familiar with. It is a prequel, starring a man named Arthur who is part of Dutch's Van Der Lind gang, a group of bandits you spend much of the first game hunting down and executing for the government. The game takes place in the same truncated western world as the first, with the territory expanded eastward. You may already know the fate of many of the characters. Arthur, however, is a mystery, and as far as I know he was never mentioned in the original game.

In these early hours, the game spends an enormous amount of time trying to be the world's greatest wild west simulator. The developers have spend a enormous amount of time polishing every single side action and animation to make them painfully realistic. On a hunt, you have to track your prey slowly as not to startle them. When you skin an animal, you're forced to set through a cutscene while Arthur gruesomely cuts and rips the skin from the animal, leaving it's exposed carcas behind. Buying weapons and ammo from a shop involves flipping through and actual catalog instead of choosing items from a simple menu. Your horse's testical shrink when it is cold.

A rain soaked Blackwater

This is all incredibly, and technically, impressive. The sheer amount of things you can do in this world is unprecedented in any open world game, even Breath of the Wild. Unline BotW, it's also incredibly mundane. After the game introduced me to many of these mini-games, I never felt the urge to do it again. The ability to drop into an inn, take a bath, trim your beard, play some poker, get drunk, is novel and immersive, but ultimately so fucking boring because many of these actions take nearly as long as doing them in real life.

This lack of agency initially turned me off of the game. It also didn't help that I was not connecting with the character at all, because I was too distracted by each new mission introducing a mechanic like fishing or herding sheep that I would never have the desire to revisit. It also didn't help that Arthur has that no nonsense demeanor that made him feel both pricipaled yet dull.

Arthur is a man of few words, whose actions seem neither carefully calculated or brash, just acted out. This is likely by design. Besides a few characters, the game doesn't expend much energy exploring Arthur's past demons. Whether you choose to go in guns blazing or use your cowboy stoicism to handle the situation, the rest of the world seems indifferent to your actions. One mission may have you talking a man out of killing a hostage, the next may have you killing security guards to rob a bank. This strange, ambiguous morality contrasts sharply with Red Dead's original protagonist, John Marston, who we already know is a bad guy trying to be good, whom we sympathize with when he relapses to his darker side.

So fast forward a year after becoming bored, the first mission I picked back up with was one where you have to help save Arthur's ex-girlfriend's brother. This is the first mission that I encountered that touched on Arthur's backstory deeper than "remember that time in Mexico we almost got shot?" You could tell there were some unrequited feelings that both had for each other, but because of Arthur's lifestyle and her desire to settle down, the two couldn't reconcile.

Having got over this hump, I decided to railroad the main story. The game is over 40 hours long if you just ignore all the side content, and even then you're still introduced to mini-games and mechanics that don't add anything. This proved to be a good decision, and most of the interesting side quests (like a Nikola Tesla-esque man attempting to build a robot deep in the mountains) you'll stumble upon between missions. It kept me engaged, and there wasn't any time where I felt like I was missing anything by not fishing, hunting deer, or taking a bath.

See that over there? It's gonna take you 10 minutes to ride your sorry ass to it.

The world is huge, and here would be a good time to say that there is not one square inch of this game that's not beautiful. It goes from snowy mountains to sweeping desert vistas to dense forests. Sometimes, at twilight, I'd stop my horse and just fucking marvel at how good everything looks. The world feels alive. You can see bugs zipping around as you walk through tall grass. All of this is, like I mentioned, technically impressive, but it does help slice through the monotony of riding your horse for 10 minutes between each mission.

It's like the designers knew this too, as there's an option to put your horse on auto-pilot and enter "cinematic mode" and watch an ad-hoc cutscene while your character rides and talks to other gang members about their current objective.

While I enjoyed the story and the graphics, the gunplay and the mission design feels incredibly archaic. In one mission, you're tasked with stealing something from the main office of a lantern oil factory. I snuck up on the roof and tried to sneak in through the window of the office, only to find the window locked. That's not surprising, but the sheer fact that I had gotten on the roof pissed off the game and it informed me that I had failed the objective and had to restart the mission. In another, I had to escape by boat. As I got closer to shore I decided to jump out of the boat, to which the game informed me that I had failed the mission because I had left the boat about 6 feet too early.

The weapons are obviously going to be a little slow and clunky to fire, this being the early 1900's, but aiming is an exercise in tedium. The "dead eye" mechanic where you can slow time and target enemies to rapidly fire off shots at returns from the original Red Dead, and it's painful how much you have to abuse it to be able to kill anything gracefully. Rockstar hasn't ever had a game that had really good shooting mechanics, but it feels like very little has changed since 2010.

No major spoilers, but like the first game it features a lengthy epilogue that takes you back into the world of the first Red Dead Redemption. Ultimately this final few hours of the game feels much more hollow than the rest of the acts. An event that is only briefly mentioned in the first game, the cholera outbreak in the region, is in full swing here and it feels like an excuse to make this section not as "alive" or fleshed out and full of things to do as the rest of the game.

The sunsets in this game are unreal

This hollowness juxtaposed with excessive freedom and things to do unfortunately permeates the game. Early in the game you are forced to tame and bond with a horse. For a majority of the game, this was my primary horse, and I spent a lot of my limited funds upgrading and customizing it's stats. During a random mission, I was a little too close to my horse during a shoot out and it took a stray bullet. I didn't expect the game to actually kill my horse, because, well, it's a fucking video game, but I came back after the mission and the only thing I could salvage form my guy was the saddle. I couldn't just transfer all of the hard work I put into that horse into another one either, I had to get a newer, shitter horse and ride that guy through the rest of the game. And because the game insists on realism, this horse hated me and bucked and fought my movements, after I'd gotten used to having responsive controls of my old horse.

I bring this up because several hours later, my horse got killed again during a scripted story mission, and I didn't even have a choice. Arthur grieves over his lost companion, and all I felt was rage that I'd have to train yet another horse. That moment was shattered for me.

The game spent an enormous amount of time trying to get me to feel something, while also letting me make the choice of being a good cowboy or a bad cowboy. Often how the game wanted me to feel, felt the opposite of how I was trying to tell Arthur's story. It's a great achievement as an open-world cowboy simulator, graphically stunning, but does everything in its power to make you avoid its strongest assets; the world, its characters, and their story. The words "RED DEAD REDEMPTION" that popped up on screen when you finish the first game will always be burned into my retinas, a crescendo of emotions peaking as you avenge your father's unjust death. Unfortunately this game never quite hits those highs, but all the toys and pretty graphics are enough to redeem it.

Redemption

One last note, I found myself a little sad after finishing this game. It's such an amazing place to visit, and leaving the world is a little like ending a nice vacation. Part of me wants to fire it back up, hop on my horse, and just ride around watching the sun go down.