"Pretentious" is such a lazy, insipid criticism. It seems to be applied to anything that attempts any sort of ambition. It's almost never followed up with any detailed criticism, and largely just used as a way to disregard anything that, to the limp critic, is "trying too hard."
The OP cries about supposedly unexplained plot and character points that are fully explained in the game, because he didn't have the patience to understand these explanations or seek them out.
Boring.
I dread to see any of the otherwise well-regarded video game stories like Planescape: Torment or The Longest Journey coming out today. They'd likely be lambasted as pretentious, faux-philosophical drivel. It's difficult to take seriously.
I very much regret using the word pretentious now, even though it's something I've heard used to describe this game often. I feel that that is distracting from the main critiques that I think are pretty reasonable.
I did seek them out, this last play through I found nearly everything, and spent about 12-13 hours in the game, a lot of it just wandering around. Still a lot of plot points that just come and go, like Fink's sudden interest in Booker for like 30 minutes, or Comstock being irreedeemable racist bastard for incredibly
poorly explained reasons- the one given more or less is that he's essentially hijacked the idea of baptism to justify his past, but becomes aware that he's living a lie because despite his forgiveness bluster, he hasn't squared his past like Booker did with rejecting the baptism, and overcompensated to a frankly cartoonish degree to justify himself. I'm also aware of Booker's implied Native American ancestry which really doesn't factor in like you would think and is fairly easy to miss if you're not paying attention.
Other elements are explained but still feel like they really don't fit- Boys of Silence are glorified security cameras for one short level, and Songbird is so advanced he may as well be powered by alien space magic compared to something like the Big Daddies, but it's all hand waived with tears and quantum particles suspended indefinitely by Lutece's science.
I know some of it is there, I just don't find it blends as well as they seem to think it does. None of that changes my main point that the story is incredibly unfocused with a bunch of dangling threads.
In summary, it's about a mysterious phrase:
Bring us the girl, wipe away the debt
Which leads to:
Vision of future 1984 attack on New York (which isn't even explained until it drops suddenly in the last 2-3 hours of the game and is resolved as quickly as it came up)
Rescuing Elizabeth
Being the False Shephard
Booker's violent past and desperate gambling and drinking
Lutece's being dead but also unstuck in time due to experiments
Father Comstock being a violent religious cult leader
Comstock knows Dewitt
Columbia will conquer the Sodom below
Songbird is some kind of monstrous protector that will hunt them down (but only when it's plot convenient)
Elizabeth is rescued, we have to leave
To escape we have to go kill my old boss from Wounded Knee who has his whole separate plot of soldiers feeling betrayed by Comstock
We steal a ship
Booker is an asshole so Elizabeth clocks him and you have to chase her
Daisy Fitzroy steals the ship right back- here's the Vox
Daisy will help if she gets guns, so we need to find the gunsmith Chen Lin at Fink's
Then we go meet Fink- Fink wants Booker to be his head of security all of a sudden oh wait Chen Lin is dead and here's a tear lets introduce that nightmare of multiple universes
Chen Lin is alive/dead simultaneously
Some people are ghosts who are dead and remember it now everyone is screwed up
Quantum magic makes the city float
In this universe I guess the Vox got their guns
Vox are brutalizing Columbia
One universe of Booker is a martyr for the Vox for a hot second
Fitzroy is evil after all (unless you play Burial at Sea)
And that's only up until about halfway through the game. The plot completely disappears in on itself by the end which really comes out of nowhere. There's always a man, lighthouse, city? Come on.
Great ideas, lots of ambition, but really jumbled and simplistic execution.
I don't think the problem with BioShock Infinite's story is that it's dumbed down. If anything it's overcomplicated, probably because Levine and co. didn't fully understand the concepts either. It just throws stuff from ten different concepts of time travel and multiple dimension theories together and tries to handwave it by claiming nonsensical stuff like "constants and variables", even though the game clearly breaks it's own narrative rules multiple times.
It kinda reminded me of Richard Kelly's films who also seems to want to handle way too difficult concepts that he himself doesn't understand.
Completely agree.
