Infamous versus Longevity

 It's what the network wants- so why bother complain?

Yeah, I'm big on mortality this month it would seem. I guess the very concept of living forever has always been an interesting topic broached by science fiction and even fantasy here and there. Ideas and concepts might seem to last forever, legacies can feel longer lasting than the gods, but the truth is that even ideas themselves will one-day burn up into nothing once the cosmos finally go quiet. All things die. People, nations, ideas and gods. Death stalks everyone and everything, wolfish and grinning beneath it's red-eyed hood. You can choose to fight against death and be dragged down in a flurry of sweat, spit and snot; or dispense with the adversarial accoutrements and greet the end as a friend, departing from this life as equals. So, now that I've managed to make a reference to Puss in Boots and Harry Potter within one paragraph, how do you think I'm going to get around to the Infamous series?

Infamous is the action adventure franchise that put Sucker Punch Productions on the map as a talented 'exclusives creator' for Sony. Well... actually I guess that was more 'Sly Cooper', now wasn't it... Or maybe 'Ghost of Tsushima?" You know what, Sucker Punch Productions are just a supremely talented studio that by the graces of some distant and archaic deity have never really produced a total dud of a game- and yet somehow I've managed to miss most all of their library. Even when I owned a Playstation, I was more of a 'Ratchet And Clank' sort of guy; and when Infamous was doing the rounds for it's chaotic and flashy gameplay, I was trying to get into it's low-rent copy-cat 'Prototype'. (And 'Ghost' has yet to port to PC, much to my constant and perpetual chagrin.) But I've always been interested in their games. Enough to keep an eye on everything they've been up to from afar.

In fact, I've watched out for Sucker Punch so much that I absorbed the entirety of the marketing for Infamous Second Son back when it was the gorgeous system launch title for the Playstation 4. Before Horizon was the 'in-thing', Second Sun was the game that your girlfriend told you not to worry about. It was a looker and then some, boasting life-like character models, eye-shrivelling neon glares and densely backed dystopian city streets so realistic you could just taste the stench of oppression! And the story was alright too. Yeah, I remember watching a couple of full playthroughs of both the full game and the DLC, from which I retained nothing but nightmare style flashes of forgettable characters who popped up here and there before dissolving into smudge. And I kind of remember Delsin (the hero) being excessively annoying and hard to like for most of the run time. So maybe that game's beauty was mostly skin-deep; but I still kind-of remember it. Almost.

What I didn't know at the time, and I couldn't have known considering my very 'other side of the wall' relationship with this franchise; was that the rather strong Infamous community received Infamous Second Son with a mixture of confusion and slight betrayal. Those who like Infamous did so for more than just it's eye-popping and gratifying gameplay and systems, I later came to learn, they actually liked it's characters and story beats and themes and, most of all, it's ending. That's right, Infamous was one of the few franchises that actually had a conclusion to it's stories. And that conclusion came... before the release of Second Son. Oh... yeah, that's going to be something of a tricky issue to navigate I would imagine. But let's take a look at this from a laymen's perspective and see if we can figure out what the community took umbridge with when it came to Second Son.

Spoilers for the Infamous stories, of course; but the basic synopsis goes thusly. There's some sort of recessive gene bubbling around certain random people across humanity that, when activated, gives people super powers. Super powers makes people dangerous, thus kicks off the core struggle with the protagonist (one of these powered folk) going up against forces trying to stop him, other power users going out of control and everything inbetween. It's basically a CW show set-up where by the end of the season the big-bad looks like a cheap model who refuses to wear a shirt in any of his scenes because it 'devalues his brand'. At the end of Infamous 2, in order to resolve all the story issues in one fell swoop, a McGuffin death wave is released killing everyone currently alive in the world with that special gene, activated or not, killing off the entire cast and sub-characters and ending the franchise. And then there's Second Son.

Rather humorously there is no effort devoted in the slightest to explain how Delsin and that new wave of power users survived that extinction wave, despite them definitely being alive and around when it happened. Sucker Punch didn't even stick in some throw away text-scrawl about how the 'gene evolved' or some other such backhanded rewrite, which seems to contrast with a team that appeared to somewhat care about the franchise when they were making it for the PS3. From an outsider's perspective Second Son just seems like it's own 'new generation' iteration but for Infamous fans it was largely a spit-in the face to a finale that wrapped up the entire line of stories in a neat little bow. And there's actually no sensible explanation to why Second Son would exist beyond the most cynical- because Sony needed an impressive-looking system launch title and Sucker Punch had a franchise they could pull from.

For those that loved the originals, all the problems with Second Son- it's insincere protagonist, lacklustre villains and nonsensical 'continuation'- are all emblematic of the very soul of 'selling out'. All those fans see is a franchise exhumed and necromancy-ed back to a life it happily departed, and not really to a high enough standard to justify it's own existence. Now I'm sure that at least someone at Sucker Punch had an idea for what they could do with the Infamous franchise in the future, but nothing about Second Son appeared to have that level of care and love which fans fell in love with. Which isn't to say the game was bad, it just wasn't anything special. And as someone who once absorbed everything about the game with jealous abandon and currently can't even remember half of the major plot beats... yeah, I can see their point.

The moral should be rather clear out of all this. Not every story can just be picked up and continued without a whisper of thought put into justifying why. In fact, the best stories shouldn't be, because their end is just as important as how they started and where they progressed to. Why has no one sat down and just continued the story of Lord of Rings; telling us what the next generation of Hobbits got up to? Because that would be an insult to the quality of the stories themselves and such a writer would be rightly lambasted for assuming the gall to do so. Stories, like their tellers, have to reach their end. And those stories can drag themselves out, grow stale and boring and fizzle away once the time comes that no one wants to hear them anymore, or they can bow out with dignity whilst the stage lights are still shining on them. Dignity or longevity; you can't ever have both.