Re-Surfacing.

Before I played Bioshock 2, I wasn't sure if sequelizing a masterpiece was a good idea. I couldn't think of any ways to substantially improve the experience, and rather than bring the series down by adding a second, lesser game, I was of the opinion that Bioshock should have stood as the lone entry in the franchise. While my opinion has changed, I still maintain that the tale was already told to my satisfaction the first time around. That being said, Bioshock 2 came relatively close to equaling the magic of the original. Story and gameplay contrivances brought it down a bit, but overall it was rewarding and thought-provoking to see the same Rapture with different ideals making the wheels turn. And it helped that the ending was much, much better.

I was actually going to knock the game for the pacing of its narrative, but it's deceptively simple. For the first 3/4ths of the game, there is precious little in the way of revealed plot points. Mostly, all that is given up is incidental happenings from a wide cast of characters that have no sway in the proceedings. Sofia Lamb, of course, has a lot of preaching to do, and she gets her point across rather well. I'll get into her ideology in a minute, but she's like Andrew Ryan in the sense that they both have no problem giving you an ear-full of why their ideas are so fantastically brilliant and yours are so full of shit. One of the biggest draws to the series for me is listening to these so-called leaders spout their crap about bettering society and our species, while experiencing first-hand just how bad a job they're doing. I mean, seriously. Delusions of grandeur can be quite amusing to observe, but there comes a point when you just want to sit people like Lamb and Ryan down and tell them that the world isn't as black-and-white as they see it. But I'm digressing a little too early; my original point was that the lack of narrative for around 15 hours was disturbing, to say the least. But once it kicked in, it really kicked in. I was also more than a little alarmed at that fact, because I figured way too much was going to be crammed into the end and it would feel slapped-on. Thankfully, I was wrong. Maybe the implementation was still flawed, but the narrative itself wasn't very complicated. Not in a bad way, mind you. There were only a small handful of people to come into contact with, and their roles were pretty straight-forward. Despite my earlier, misguided belief, 2K Marin didn't try to replicate the same character reversal from Bioshock. Instead, they focused more on showing people for who they were - or who they thought they were.

Take Sofia Lamb, for example. She despises everything about "the self", and makes the distinction between intelligence and consciousness. I agree that intelligence doesn't necessitate consciousness in the way she defined it, but it's ridiculous to say that being self-aware is the worst thing that could happen to us. It's an oft-used visual, but would she rather humans were more like Lemmings? It's in being self-aware that we're able to find meaning in life, and seeing her version of utopia serves only as confirmation of that fact. Ironically, Lamb stated that Ryan's vision brought about a sort of religious following, which she detested. Oh, really? That would be nothing like the cult following you accrued by drilling into their heads the ultimate value of being part of a collective, right? This is what I meant when I said the game focused on showing people for who they thought they were. Being self-aware, in some cases, can cause you to ignore reason and logic in the pursuit of personal happiness. Such is the case with Lamb. Her happiness had to do with "curing" society's ills at any cost - even her own daughter's life. She said she would never be able to forgive herself for it, but it was obviously a sacrifice she was willing to make. I guess it's not much of a stretch for her, though, since she was already using her daughter as a tool to further her own cause.

Speaking of Eleanor, the final bits of the game with her in it were a vast improvement on the original game's ending. Bioshock ended with the standard video game boss encounter, and I really hated that. This time, though, 2K Marin addressed that flaw and made the experience much more aligned with the narrative instead of actively working against it. Also, the Little Sister sequence took me by total surprise. It was great to see the world through the eyes of one of them, and there were a lot of little touches that made it rather humorous, such as the Big Daddy posters proclaiming "Daddy is so strong!" And for the most part, when I thought Bioshock 2 was going to re-tread some of the same narrative tricks from the first game, it instead varied the formula in some interesting ways. There's still the hunt for suit parts, Little Sisters are again used as a necessity for escape, and your character is artificially compulsed to complete objectives. But instead of simply powering up for a final, physical confrontation, the build-up felt organic to at least the way I envisioned the narrative flow.

I'm not sure if I saw what I think I saw at the very end. When Sofia Lamb and Eleanor are in the escape pod, Eleanor is talking to you about forgiveness. It looks like she put an oxygen mask on Lamb instead of letting her drown, and that perplexed me at first. I thought to myself, "Why the hell would she do that?" Let's face it, Eleanor hated her mother and everything she stood for. Why ,then, would she start exulting forgiveness after a life spent in captivity? Well, I think it ties back in with Lamb's wrong-headed thinking. She reasons that "the self" is the cause of everything evil inside us, and so she set about completely wiping Eleanor's ego and replacing it with the collective hopes and dreams of an entire civilization. But in rejecting those ideals and then, in the end, still choosing to save her mother, Eleanor exemplified with a single action what Lamb couldn't see within an entire city full of people. It was Eleanor's conscience that allowed her to have compassion and forgiveness, and nothing Sofia Lamb could ever say would change that. So I think one thing to take away from this is how we all have the capacity to do harm, but it's our capacity for individual goodness that makes life worth living. Even if we have a huge propensity towards hurting each other, being at least conscious of that fact and trying to work for a better existence is where human beings shine.