The final session of Red Dead is basically all narrative. The game continues to make interesting twists and have quite good character interaction. There’s one quite long fight that is very good. Overall, the ending of the game is excellent and a key of interactive experience. And the conclusion is a fascinating step up from GTA type narrative. Spoilers within.

This session is a striking departure for the rest of the game in a totally interesting and positive way. It begins with a nice resolution to one of the main plots with some decent if repetitive combat and some quite good characterizations. Then the game makes a striking turn that I never would have expected from Rockstar. There is some genuinely emotionally moving stuff in this game and I can honestly say that I have no idea where it’s going next. Bravo for his session, Red Dead. Spoilers within.

It’s a short session today and a lot of it is sucked into a bounty that takes forever to finish. Despite this, the plot remains good, and while the mechanics are nothing I haven’t seen before in this game, they are still pretty fun.  The main villain remains an excellent character in the brief scenes I see him. It’s a pretty good session on average, although it’s nothing too original and nothing too stellar. Spoilers within.

This session, I leave the last section behind and come to a whole new city. Frankly the game quality increases immediately. There are suddenly interesting missions, short travel times, and better characters. It’s not perfect — there are some totally lame dialogue steps and there’s still that annoying come back in 5 hours to do this mission set-up — but overall the game is returning to its earlier quality. Spoilers with.

This session is my last in Mexico and thank heavens for that. I kind of quickly resolve two of my character’s main goals. One is quite nice — the resolution scene and the surrounding narrative are interesting and fun to play through. The second is also interesting narratively although I seem to have a lot less choice around it.  Actually, the narrative and gameplay of this session are generally pretty good; maybe the closer I get to the end of this section, the more the game returns to its earlier better self. Spoilers within.

A short session today, I do a couple of missions and call it a night. It’s a better session, mostly because I’m finally doing something in the game that doesn’t violate my sense of the ethics here. There’s a stealth scene this time, which is totally inappropriate to this game, a confusing explosion scene that I stumble through with no idea what I’m doing,  and a straight-up crash bug that causes me to lose 15 minutes of play. The fact that all the above flaws do not overly annoying me is a sign of how happy I am that I get to play the character I want here. Spoilers within.

Another slog today with some confusing missions and some distasteful ones. I am really getting sick of the game forcing me to do evil things. I’m getting more and more disconnected with the main story as a result. The gameplay itself is ok, but the game is replaying mechanics from earlier scenes that are getting a little old. And there is one hugely inconsistent mission where a thing I’ve done in every similar situation causes me to fail and lose honor. Spoilers within.

The beginning of this session gets me within inches of quitting with horrendously long travel times and terrible save points — basically everything that causes me to quit GTAs after about eight hours. The gameplay improves later on as the mission content I am plowing through isn’t bad. But again, I’m disappointed in the open world here. The cutscenes bear no resemblances to the actions I choose to make or the character I’m portraying. And most damagingly, the game forces me into unethical actions and then condemns me even though I had no choice in doing them.  This is simply an outdated open world model — Fallout 3 did this much, much better. Spoilers within.

The game has definitely gone down in this new section. The core play is the same, but the story has gotten very annoying with alternately condescending and boring NPCs, missions are frustratingly available only in certain time windows, and there are classic Rockstar problems such as having to drive all over the map to get to missions and have stupid, stupid save points that force me to replay huge sections when I die. It’s just not cool.  I’m at a point now where I’m just playing in the hopes that this section will end quickly. Spoilers within.