After receiving numerous comments, I'll have this comment pinned to clear some things up. - Yes, Brave New World is an infinitely better comparison than 1984. I hadn't (and still haven't) read the book when I wrote this script. - It was stupid of me to leave Sally's situation as ONLY "cheating". She was taken advantage of. That was an honest mistake, as it somehow slipped my mind her age when it went down. - I made a statement saying it would be cool to have a fake Joy pill really late into the video. This exists. It's called Sunshine, and I feel like a complete moron for forgetting about it. - The dialogue changes between act I and II were made to highlight the fact that both Arthur and Sally are unreliable narrators. I somehow did not realize this. I still think they're stupid and don't flow very well, just acknowledging the fact that I didn't include that information in the video.
I adored this video, and I'm glad you clarified and defined some stuff here. I have a lot of personal issues with Sally's type of situation you mentioned here though so I'll almost glad that didn't make it into the video and catch me off guard.
I feel like you would had noticed that thing about the dialogue changes if you saw your whole video again in one sitting or if you had a new fresh pair of eyes. It's not really hard to notice
If they made hunger more of a pressing issue you could resort to Joy to eat stuff your character couldn't stomach while sober, like that rat at the beginning. If reality and inventory objects looked different on Joy, it could've made some puzzles really cool and helped the player get into the mindset of why not taking Joy is a struggle
I could've sworn that hunger and thirst were more involved in the early alpha builds... but I might've popped a joy and misremembered some things from those years.
Another sad thing about Arthur's story is that if you take the Oblivion pill, since arthur stays in the now desolate town, its very likely he starved to death or died of Joy withdrawal.
@@Mavuika_GyaruOblivion wasn't an lobotomy. Coconut Joy was supposed to be the new Joy type they would release but suffered hallucigenic issues due to the materials being used, and Oblivion just erased your memory completely, which is why Ollie struggles to remember certain things in the game (hence his visits to Sally Boyle). The brand new Joy that Verloc wanted to release but had no name for (A-124) was the lobotomizing drug (it wasn't yet in a pill form). Arthur definitely would have either died of starvation or would have gone back on his Joy after he returned, and died of thr withdrawals
Arthur doesn't shrug off Sally's line, he doesn't hear it, he doesn't even think he's in the garden district, he's taken joy too often to notice stuff like that. Arthur's effectively delusional whereas Sally isn't
oh, that's an interesting take. didn't arthurs pov of that scene take place inside sallys house, or am i the one who's high, lol i swear it was a different setting at least. i had wondered about that but thought maybe it was just that you could start the conversation in different places as i haven't played the game myself.
Arthur has the hallmarks of an abuser, and someone who always looks the best in their own mind. His POV showed himself in the best light, and he still came off as an ass. Imagine how much worse he actually was.
Why would he risk everything for someone else's child? They are in a survival situation where a baby is a huge danger and drain on everyone involved. it's not like humanity is going extinct or anything either so the child isn't even that important. She also proved herself unreliable to him before. I wouldn't take a cheating ex with a random child with her back in our current world. Why would he in that world? He seems very lucid, just annoyed she told him about the baby because now he will look worse for leaving.
@@magmaslug9305 You're the last person I'd ever want to be stuck with in a serious situation. You sound like an awful person. Like you'd stab me in the back the moment it was even slightly more convenient for you to do so than be a decent human being. No value for anyone or anything other than yourself and the things that are useful to you.
The village being named Hamlyn immediately set my brain off; brilliant detail for the writers to include. 'Hamelin' (pronounced the same way) happens to be the name of the village in the Pied Piper story, AKA the one where a man plays a tune that lures away all of the village's children and drowns them in the river.
I kinda thought the dialogue changes were cool, if a little mishandled. The idea was there, painting the both of them as unreliable narrators. Sally seemingly unable to understand why Arthur is so upset, so she remembers him as being completely unreasonable, and Arthur ignoring important details such as the baby just because he's so self-centered and whingy. Maybe they changed too many unimportant details, but maybe that was just to let you obviously know that things were different.
@@LuffyBlack idk what that has to do at all with what I said, I wasn't saying that the whole shebang wasn't bad, I'm just saying she personally probably felt that Arthur was overreacting to what she's been trying to forget about. And besides I don't think Arthur cared about the illegal age gap, he only cared that she betrayed him, cause that's his whole character, being self-centered. Again, idk wtf you're talking about or what I'm "pretending" cause that has no relation to what I said
Arthur says in his letter “what lies will I tell myself about her” and her POV in their conversations is different then his, because he IS an unreliable narrator. That’s the point. Arthur was so caught up with himself and his delusions.
He is after all revealed to be the type of person who condemned his mentally handicapped brother to die to save his own skin while repressing that memory extremely hard to avoid the guilt. And that was without joy.
@@joshuakim5240yup, he took his brother, who wouldn't even NEED to go because of his age, to convince him that they will "go togethe" because they can care for eachother, only to use his brother's passports to make them think he was only there to deliver his younger brother, and that he is a mentally handicapped kid who wouldn't even be that helpful.
But she's an unreliable narrator too since she's been on Joy just as long and didn't stop taking it during that exchange. Not saying that exonerates Arthur, if anything I feel his behavior was even worse than either of them care to admit or want to remember.
I honestly think We Happy Few would make an incredible web series, or maybe something released on a streaming service. It’s such a compelling story, and, if properly adapted, I think it could get the love it deserves.
@@aquatech1753I feel like most streaming services would meddle with it so much, that it’d be sanitized to the point where it’d be banned in only like 2 countries for one or two things. The rest of the countries wouldn’t bother with it, cause it was meddled with so much to point where it’s not even good anymore.
That entire scene was magnificent. Arthur confronting his past and reconciling with the fact that yes he is an absolute garbage human being, the bobby sharing words of wisdom and helping him reflect and work through it. Masterful!
@@JetstreamTheSexSamdude, you do realize that women have been taught to blame themselves for sexual assault and r*pe for thousands of years right? That craps' been perpetuated since before the Bible.
@@JetstreamTheSexSamit’s unfortunately common for victims of sexual assault to blame themselves. I can’t say if that’s what the writers were trying to convey, but it’s the only decent way to read the situation. A grown man and a 16 year old girl is not a healthy, consensual relationship, no matter the intent of the writers.
@snowyd5136 I don't care if a 16 year old is actively asking older men to have sex with them, the blame is on the adult man with a 16 year old and a wife choosing to have sex with a teenager.
@@JetstreamTheSexSamso you’re just a weirdo then. Or you’re just too dim to understand unhealthy power dynamics A 16 year old does not have sex with an adult. That is called rape
@snowyd5136 I'm sorry. Why are you acting like Arthur's dad isn't a fully developed adult with a fully developed brain. Who took in this child to take care of because she had nothing? That's what gets me. Yall don't wanna focus on the person who is in the wrong no matter how you slice it. Why is it that the child gets criticised but the grown adult doesn't???
Its very true no matter what pain you have created for anyone including yourselves being alive leaves the door open to positives reminds me of one anime scene where a character says they have nothing inside them but then are told every reason some feels joy because of them
Honestly Sally’s story should’ve touched on the so called “cheating” more. She was taken advantage of but they both refer to it as cheating and is subsequently the reason why Sally can even get Arthur what he wants.
@@Causticksprobably cause of the time period it's set in, misogyny and all that. I don't doubt that rape was extremely common given that the police were corrupt and unsympathetic, society hadn't progressed in decades, the widespread usage of joy probably made remembering it happening difficult for the victim, and if you did manage to remember you'd be beat to death or exiled for being a 'downer'.
Not really. It is representation of the time period. Nowadays people called that by it's name, but in the past you was at fault for your own demise. It's actually would ruin everything if they looked deeper into this or tried to show it's in modern view point. Even more this is just another way to erases the history. We gonna keep repeat the same mistake if we gonna act like this time period never existed. So, they did the right thing to keep it this way. It's just shows how the past mindset with WW2 can scar people.
@@Pihsrosnec She probably suppresses how bad it was for her as well though, since it's difficult to fully process what happened. I think it could've still been possible to make it more obvious that Sally isn't the one "at fault," that rather she was taken advantage of and assaulted.
@@Causticksprobably because the game expects you to be smart enough to already know that, and to understand that everyone around her can continue to deny what happened to her while she’s still pushed into the role of “comforting older men with drugs and sex” in order to survive. Her ending is her finally escaping from it.
if you’ve ever had a disabled friend or loved one you know that decision Arthur made to abandon Percy makes sense but no one would do it you have to be bottom of the bottom but the emotional tropes in this game hit so hard
The reveal with Ollie’s side of the conversation was actually amazing. Him saying “you could never forget something like that” sounded almost like a response to Arthur but just weird enough to make you question what’s going on, until you see his perspective
1:31:20 Fun Fact: There is an actual "fake joy" in the game. It's called sunshine and is actually what Sally has been taking alongside the blackberry she makes herself. It's a pill in a similar shape to ecstasy but with a sun symbol stamped on it. If you use it instead of Joy, people will still think you're on Joy (i.e, detector booths, bobbies, wellies) but you'll have no withdrawals and the filter will be different from the normal pink Joy.
@@hayana-sanjo There's a group of three witches living in the garden district. They gave her a choice, let them help deliver the baby and they'll continue to help Sally through her journey or abort it prematurely and she'll get no help from them
@@hayana-sanjodespite what the media loves to indicate, it IS possible to deliver a baby alone, as long as there are no complications (like something tearing and you sitting there, bleeding out). It's a sad example, but consider how many stories there are each year of a teenage girl delivering a baby in a bathroom, then throwing the baby away. She does it completely alone then, doesn't she? Concealing her secret shame from the world... there's a girl who was just sentenced for killing her baby in such a way...
@@hayana-sanjo when you're a key member in an operation that requires little active presence, and the bulk of your team is a bunch of druggies that won't remeber things in a couple of days, it's a lot more immediate. just say that she came with a stomach bug, and you have basically a free month
@@hayana-sanjo I mean everyone was drugged out of their minds, so not like it wasn't impossible. With an easy enough birth, no one might've noticed the difference. (I suppose even she could've taken Joy during it in order to make it more bearable and not be screaming or something.)
The moral of We Happy Few is really that procedural generation should NOT be seen as a selling point, but rather a potentially useful tool in an artist's arsenal. A game like We Happy Few would've benefited greatly from BioShock's map design philosophy. Large, open hubs. Unfortunately it was developed at a time where games were touting "unlimited replay potential" thanks to procedural generation.
I feel like it would've been a better game if it shifted its focus into being either a Metroidvania with semi-open-world elements or incorporating an immersive sim philosophy inspired by Deus Ex and Dishonored, in which the game world is split into a series of self-contained, mission-focused areas with handcrafted level designs where different types of objectives can be approached in numerous ways depending on your playstyle. The biggest problem with We Happy Few was that despite having a solid foundation for story, characters, setting, and worldbuilding, it can't even decide what type of gameplay was it trying to be. Was it a linear story-driven action-adventure game? Or an open-world survival crafting game with roguelike elements?
@Noelle_Holiday no part of this game is RPG. Has people's perception of the genre been so diluted, that they think this game and Final Fantasy are at all similar?
It originally had handmade areas in early access but that was changed to procedural which made it way worse. Stranded deep did the opposite they noticed low quality in procedural generation so they changed to hand making the area. We have learnt if your a big or small team 90% of the time procedural generation isn't going to work
I remember when the trailer for this game was released, I was super excited. I was expecting something like bioshock; and immersive sim, close corridors and fun combat. What was released was something very different, and I didn't like the game. It would have been cool to have something like that with this story but it's whatever. Cool game nevertheless
Procedural Generation is something that is designed mainly for sandbox and roguelike games, where the whole concept is starting from nothing in a random environment and planning towards an end goal. We Happy Few could work with the idea if it was mainly focused on gameplay, leaning on the roguelike/survival elements, but a story focus like it has doesn't work.
There actually is a "fake joy" that Sally literally gives you during Authur's questline. It's a special drug called Sunshine which makes you look like you're on Joy, without actually being on it.
I remember watching Jacksepticeye play the first few minutes of the game. The intro was so compelling and stuck with me, but never saw the full story. Just that small concept. It's a shame really, truly an interesting story weighed down by a Bad Game. Because I didn't pursue looking for the rest of the game after seeing my favourite youtubers stop playing it, since the gameplay was a bore to watch too.
Same. I remember watching 8BitRyan play an early version of it when I was younger, and I was immediately interested. Fantastic introduction and worldbuilding.
As someone who has struggled with addiction for much of my life the description of joy really hits home. That guy saying “it doesn’t make you forget, just fuzzy around the edges so you can pretend it’s okay” is a pov I am very familiar with
Same. i was on meth back in the day for more years than i want to admit and it was all to forget the past. I've been clean now for 6 years and the memories still burn painfully but afraid as i am of the memories, i'm more afraid of becoming 'that person' again. Life goes on.
@@fluttershystayshigh4202I know that i'm just a completely random person on the planet, but i'm proud of you. Thats no easy feat, so be sure to give yourself a pat on the shoulder now and then❤
What sucks about Arthur & Sally is that when Arthur's Dad takes Sally in as a minor when she has nowhere else to go, coercing her into sex, teaching her the pattern she follows in the game of trading bodily autonomy for safety, etc... Arthur reacts like a teenage boy in the 1960s without a lot of emotional intelligence or awareness of others (and as we know from his main storyline, general selfishness) who just had his heart broken by the girl he liked. Rage, refusal to listen or empathize, hurt, spite, disgust, etc. But where the real tragedy lies is that he then takes Joy for 15 years, and doesn't ever have a chance to think about why that situation might have been f*cked on her side, or develop empathy, or just generally emotionally mature. He IS a man-child who lives in a state of permanent arrested development. How could he not be? When would he have had the opportunity to grow? He frustrates the hell out of me and is my least favorite of all three protagonists. He's fantastically written.
Yeah that's what I thought about arthur, he's all screwed up in the head from all the joy and the only thing he really remembers from the "cheating" incident is probably his feeling of rage and betrayal that he felt from when he was a teenage boy. Also doesn't help that sally, being a groomed victim thought that she's at fault and can't slap him with the cold hard truth of how much of a pos his dad actually is
I came to the conclusion that Arthur's dad is the worst character of the story. I mean, you have to be an asshole if your child turns out to be so selfish and unsympathetic, and then what he did to Sally...
It never says she was coerced or forced into sex. Every character has a flaw and something that they did wrong. Sallys was sleeping with her boyfriends dad and continuing to use her body to gain power by sleeping with the general.
Aurthers ending, after the whole story just makes sense. He was a terrible person who did terrible things and now, he gets to properly feel terrible. It isn't a good or bad ending, it's a new beginning. A time for him to see himself for who he is and too at the very least never do it again. The choice is a simple "good" vs "bad", to forget and too regress into a child or to grow and become an adult.
I think the entire 'Arthur is the worst person' segment of the video was unnecessary. Yes, he is a terrible person. Does that make his story less compelling? No! His end is him realizing just how terrible he truly is, his arc ends where others start. Yes his ending doesn't have any greater significance for the people of the city, but its the end of the first act! He introduced the city, story-wise he doesn't need to do anything else either. A bad person doesn't make a bad story. Stories don't need moral protagonists to be compelling. For this story, Arthur is exactly where he needs to be to make it work. At least, imo
@@seasnaill2589 nah, it definitely adds. It brings light to that arc and this is literally an analysis video. Him not including that section would be a huge oversight if he intends to also do the Ollie and Sally parts
Frankly, if they do some form of We Happy 2, I feel like it should follow Arthur trying to recover Percy, through Germany, where the population is also under heavy joy because it would make Nazism seem even better, with the moral being that the key to actual happiness is overcoming strife and being with relatives. Something like that, and throughout the story, you’re given side quests, and the more you complete the better ending you get, on a scale. Because the more selfless acts Arthur commits, the more of a good person he becomes, the more he regrets and seeks forgiveness from his brother, the more his brother forgives him. Redemption through trial by fire.
44:31 What I love most about this sequence is that Constable Peters is obviously not falling for Arthur's bs. He fully knows Arthur is not Percy, he knows he's lying his way off the train so he doesn't need to go to Germany. But at the same time, he still doesn't want to send Arthur on the train. His sense of morality blocks him from doing so. Not a single extra child on that death train than what is needed. So he let's Arthur go, not because he was convinced, but because the quota was already filled in with Percy being on board. Arthur led his brother to the station like a lamb to the slaughter. He didn't even need to lie his way off, that's just a formality at that point. A brat who only looked out for himself, wearing a wool coat of innocence to hide his selfishness. That's who Arthur Hastings is. The whole story was for him to accept he was a piece of shit and move on with his life. Not to make amends but grow as a person. The growth stunted by years of joy consumption, trying to escape from the truth.
You worded this perfectly! I heavily doubted that he actually believed Arthur, especially since he switches up his speaking patterns a ton, but it was really his morality that prevented him from sending Arthur
@@donovian2538 The train is basically an insurance policy so the residents of Wellington Wells don't try anything funny. Between the kids and the papier-mache tanks, the populace are practically powerless against their occupiers. We don't know the fates of the children but they're either in Germany, dead, or escaped somehow. No in-between (most likely dead though)
@@donovian2538 Its heavily implied that the trains are an analog for the trains the Germans used to transport Jewish people, so yeah, there more than likely dead or in a camp too be killed.
The point of Arthur’s dialogue changes in Act 2 is to show how he mentally erased the things that are unpleasant and inconvenient to remember. It’s exactly like the way he forgot about what he did to his brother, even after he became a “downer.” Arthur’s coping mechanism is denial, and it makes him an unreliable narrator.
yeah I've always thought that what Arthur said in Sally's run was what he really said and heard, and everything he said to Sally in his run is what he wanted to remember.
If only it got treated like bioshock. Linear world, framed by exelent writing, about desperate people, trying to deal with a society falling apart around them. And all the sides and attitudes that can bring. It deserved that better structure. Truly.
I don't know how well joy wold have worked around a linear world you know always needing to be high to pass security checks sounds like a pain in a linear world
@@tizianm4893 It could have been a cost-benefit thing with specific booths and enemies who would become more suspicious if you were around them and clearly not effected. Compared to if you were effected, but you couldn't stealth and would perhaps get massive de-buffs to do fine maneuvering tasks like lock picking or the like. Or as suggested, maybe you could fake taking the drug, if you take a pill in front of the cops, and you'd have a few seconds to walk away, and spit it out before it would start to effect you. Like a social stealth system basically, but with negatives to other approaches, like combat or "regular" stealth, for a limited time. Perhaps more, depending.
The game is based around "3 terrible characters with bad histories" so imagine if Sally did give birth but actually killed Gwen to keep her quiet but then again I'm quite happy with her ending and also that's a bit fucked up
nah, him completely omitting sally telling him shes had a baby from his perception is phenomenal characterization. youre describing a feature as if its a bug
It really emphasize how much of a self centered dickwad he his. I think if they just nodded at him brushing that detail off a slightly bit more it would have worked great.
Instead of remaking old popular games, we should be remaking games like this that would’ve been phenomenal works if certain changes had been made to them. We Happy Few would be seen as an amazing game if the gameplay was linear, the combat was refined, and the story matched up properly. This game was a victim of the open-world craze of the late 2010s. Yet another game that was open world despite having no reason to be.
Sadly, games like this only get smaller fanbases that wouldn't make remakes like that profitable. But yeah, another game that I think comes to mind is Final Fantasy XIII. It would be great if games with lackluster gameplay could have a time for redemption like that.
A more likely opportunity for We Happy Few is an adaptation. The main attraction of this game and what brings most to it now is the amazing writing. A series or movie would be wonders
The setting for We Happy Few actually isn't a "Nazis won WWII" world. The Nazis were overthrown and Germany was ruled by Rommel. Britain surrendered to the Germans, but the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. did not, leading to both American and Soviet soldiers fighting alongside each other on the Eastern Front and leading to a longer war which did defeat Germany, but Britain never recovered when they retreated from Britain
1:16:00 Slight correction, Sally didn't just give Ollie some amalgamation of Joy pills willy nilly so he could completely forget. It was a special batch of Joy. Oblivion. It doesn't just makes your memory fuzzy around the edges. It scrambles your brain entirely. The reason it was never mass produced and distributed en masse is because once a person takes oblivion, you're not really happy, just all over the place, schizophrenic, random, sensitive in all the wrong ways. Because the point of Oblivion isn't to feel happy, it's to forget. The same pill is even offered to Arthur in the epilogue by Head Constable Peters at the bridge. If he does take the pill, he goes back to the garden district, obliviously having a good time on the playground equipment. Undoing ALL the character development he had achieved throughout the course of the game. He was happy before, wasn't he? What's stopping him from going back?
It’s interesting to analyze this story, especially cause I realized Arthur’s thoughts about sally are similar to a kids. He doesn’t think of the negative experience for her, he cares that he was hurt by it. In a way. This is similar to how some less developed teenagers may think of this situation. Personally I think it may imply that joy stopped him from maturing past this mindset, refusing him the opportunity to grow and realize how much it hurt her too. He simply doesn’t. Because joy didn’t truly let him become an adult.
Despite the actual game being kind-of a mess, I still love and genuinely appreciate that they got an actual band to do insert songs for this. It's such a cool touch that adds a lot more personality to the experience, more than normal soundtrack osts at least.
This story is an example of how video games aren't always the be-all-end-all medium. This would've benefited a lot from being a web series or a Graphic Novel.
I agree to a point, but I think if they had just made it a linear game like Bioshock, it would have went over really well. People were comparing the vibes to Bioshock already and I remember a linear game is what I thought it was and what made me excited to play it.
@@gigiluv5527 I was one of those people. Right away it looked like "Cold War BioShock," ready to tackle era relevant politics complete with influences from Brave New World and Cold War Spy-Fi like The Prisoner, The President's Analyst, 007 and The Cape Town Affair. Then... We got what we got. The gameplay choices and map really hindered WHF's potential. Same goes for Deathloop, it had great gameplay with memorable characters, but lacked WHF's story weight and had a bizarre/distracting multi element. I'm hungry for a 1960s retro-future title without the half hearted game elements.
I'm absolutely obsessed with the "They Came From Below" DLC. The relationship between Roger and James is so realistically bickery yet strangely endearing and I adore it.
All 3 of the DLCs are spectacular. I rly didn't like how hugely We All Fall Down undermines Ollie's story, but it has an amazing atmosphere. I like They Came From Below as a more silly and fantastical story w some rly fun leads but Lightbearer is my fav for the music, Nick being my fav character to play as (besides Arthur) and the gameplay being actually fun???? Crazy
@@yeethittter1285 Each character had their own part to play in saving Wellington Wells, whether the narration of said character is accurate or not. Whilst some may have done more than others, each "means to an end" brought about positive change that resulted in a surviving civilization.
@@KingSolidTails What I mean is that Oli's story about convincing the people of Wellington Wells to get off of joy was a really satisfying ending for the game and for his character arc. but if Victoria gets rid of all the joy anyway then Oli's choice doesn't matter at all because they've stopped anyway. Not from their own descision after hearing Jack's broadcast, but because they're literally forced to
Also, if I was a gay man in the 1950s and I had the choice to live in a dimension full of emotionally intelligent robots with my boyfriend? Easy choice. Beep boop. I mean, I’m a gay man _now_ and I would still maybe prefer the robots.
I'm surprised that in Sally's story they didn't go more into her cheating on Arthur since it's so important to why he's bitter towards her. Considering she was a teen who'd lost her entire family and Arthur's dad was an adult taking care of her and in a position of authority over her, I feel like it would've been more impactful to actually show her side of the situation instead of just saying in letters that she felt like she had no other choice. There also could've been interesting parallels between Arthur's dad and General Byng. Both were much older men in positions of power over her who she slept with out of survival purposes and were using her for their own pleasure.
@@Zabe_B i didn't see your comment. When you say lack of agency are you also considering that she was living under drugged totalitarian rule? In her position she was striving to make ends meet for her baby and for herself, plenty of pressured women have been in that position before.
Definitely agree as there is a lot of agrument in the fandom itself as to whether Sally was fully... Forced.. into the relationship with Arthur's Father. There are TONS OF FANS who hate her and it's mainly because of how poor her story is compiled. So many people hate the baby mechanic, I found it super easy to work around. People call Sally a slut, I think she's a victim.. it's honestly sad but if they would have put more love into writing her like Arthur.. or even Ollie.. She's kinda the filler between the real stories
@@DespiteEverything42 The baby mechanic was honestly super fun. I liked the mix of being a baddie on the streets and coming home to check on my baby. idk it might just be me.
@@viewer6152that’s the problem when you make a story with realistic elements that are weirdly blurred. Even when done well there will always be people like the villain willing to defend the villain, since the story is portraying a person who can exist irl… it’s disgusting how many ppl I’ve seen willing to breeze past the fact she was 16 or just basic pedo garbage in other horror games. Bonkers. They don’t realize they’re the type of abusers these games are talking about.
As soon as we swap to Sally, this video went off the rails... it's the Unreliable Narrator. Sally in Arthur's chapters is sweet, kind, innocent - he sodding says so in fact - so he mostly edits in his still likely drug addled mind to make her sound more like that. More sweet, more innocent. She smiles, and gives him affectionate looks, etc. He's also a selfish git so he edits, misremembers, or even miisperceives what HE says in these scenarios. He even sounds distracted and delirious, the way he runs into her sentence to mention Percy and rambles and changes topic so often. Probably because he's still coming down. Also he 'lives in teh Garden district' because he's a Downer. They're subtle changes, meant to illustrate what Joy and drug addiction has done to people. Sally and Arthur aren't magically immune to the same mental damages everyone else has suffered.
THANK YOU this is how I felt too. I genuinely am having a good time with this video but i've been hit by this part and I was. Like. Surprised. Because this is about Perspectives and how everyone remembers the situation. They could have, of course, tightened some scenes up to make that a little more obvious (such as her asking him about the codliver oil in the garden district as opposed to them being in their home), but these are all about people who are bad in some aspects of their lives but justify their actions to a degree. They see their actions differently than others, so of course they're going to remember these scenes differently or see them in a different light.
Actually, I think the differences in the confrontation between Arthur and Sally in their sections of the game is brilliant storytelling, and I can't help but feel it was unintentional. They both have been on a drug for a decade now that messes with perceptions and memories. Arthur also has a twisted perception anyway to preserve his own ego. So who's to say what the objective truth of the matter was, since we only have their subjective perceptions of the event? Did Sally actually mention her baby or did Arthur block that out so he doesn't have to feel even more like a shitheel for abandoning her at the slightest inconvenience? We know hurtful words were exchanged and ultimately a trade was made, but the whole thing is muddled by having two unreliable narrators being involved, and honestly that's fucking brilliant.
Thank you, I just commented this myself. This is a game where you're playing as people with mental health issues who've been burying their feelings with denial and/or drugs. Of course there's gonna be unreliable narration.
That's exactly what I thought as well. Also, how do we know Sally really mentioned her baby? Maybe she thought she did but her mistrust made her not let ir out
the irony that the game wasnt originally intended to have a story, yet by far its best part was the story, and ended up being one of the best stories in all of gaming
Honestly, yeah. I say the stories up there in best in terms of pure realism (barring the futuristic elements), with believable characters that all have their equally terrible but good traits, a very strong moral and lesson, and a good ending. The DLCS may have been very construed (except for We All Fall Down), but I still say that put it all together, We Happy Fews story is very high up on the list, and is only beat down by these damn game mechanics, and some of the plot incontinence it suffers
Honestly the cutscene starting out with the screams of people when you threw that cocktail is a perfect example of what the game is going for: ignoring abything unpleasant
The thing about the different cutscenes is that I doubt any of them are really representing what happened. I think its true that Arthur's make the most sense but did you notice how inconsistent the other's recollection is? Sally sees Arthur as being short tempered and unreasonably volatile. Sally even swears less. "Yee of little fucking faith" "Ye of little faith" Maybe he is unreasonable but she sees herself as being completely and utterly wronged by him. Ollie sees Arthur sneering a lot and holding the fake tank newspaper at a distance like it disgusts him, probably thinking he's a prissy little civilian. In Ollie's cutscene Arthur moves in a way that makes him look particularly scrawny.
imo arthurs could also make the most sense because he makes it make sense. he can't remember himself as acting *too* unreasonably because then he would have to face how selfish he really is. he does this eventually but at the point where he's talking to sally, he hasn't started to face it at all. maybe sally is also unreliable, but i wouldn't say that her scenes don't make sense, at least the examples that were pointed out in the video. arthur doesn't read to me like he's sincerely offering to help, for instance. imo, he's asking because he believes it will make him look like a decent person. I think he's actually hoping she doesn't want something out of the deal so he can keep telling himself she cares about and loves him. in fact he all but says as much after she asks for the cod liver oil. even in the letter he writes he's self absorbed, seemingly making it about whether sally truly loved him or not. he's a thirty year old man still hung up on a high school girlfriend who (in his eyes) spurned him. that's just not stable behavior.
Sally and Ollie are the only ones who have been completely sober though, Arthur is even more deluded than Oliver since he never admits to any sort of fault and blames Sally for being abused by his Dad. Starkey on the other hand is fully aware that Margaret isn't real and is still lucid despite his psychosis.
The differences in the cutscenes are a nod to Rashomon. Everyone has their own interpretation of what happened, and their suspicions about other people's motivations can creep into their memories and color the interactions. Nobody's lying, but nobody actually grasps the full "truth" either.
I still just cannot fathom that this man has spent nearly half of his whole life angry at his ex for being a victim of what would count in most places as statutory you-can-fill-in-the-blank.
It's an alternate reality for the 1960s/1970s where most people, including Arthur before the game starts, are so drugged out they don't realise when they are starving to death, and the ones that aren't are in a constant fight for survival. Education around these points was generally much worse around those topics back then, even in the real world, the alternate reality stuff makes it even less likely that people would have access to any kind of information on consent. The fact that they are either so drugged out they barely remember stuff or fighting for survival makes them really unlikely to actually deal with their emotions, or process their trauma in any kind of useful and healthy way. He wasn't angry at her for half his life, he was really angry at her immediately after the fact, because he was a selfish, already traumatised teenager with little awareness of these things, and then probably half forgot, except maybe in small bursts, until he finally sees her again once off the drugs. He had zero opportunities to grow as a person, and probably no notion of consent (from a modern perspective) since it happened. It would have taken a much, much better person to even begin to understand what she went through in these conditions. The entire society had no opportunity to progress, you can't have protests, tracts, essays in that kind of world, the whole setup almost guarantees that no positive change will happen. Things just stay the same until the whole system collapses.
@@filiaautand that's certainly understandable within the narrative. I'm blown away, or just perturbed by the real world in the comments defenders of Arthur like Sally is somehow worse for having a grown man take advantage of her.
@@filiaaut This is the biggest problem I have with stories set around the 1950s that features content like this, it's not clearly handled like "this is how it was back in the time and it was wrong", more just that it was an afterthought which still paints victims in a bad light
ollie and margaret's voice acting in their climax scene is so, _so_ good, especially ollies- i mean he sounds EXACTLY like someone whod realized what he had done, its perfect
This game is such a tragedy. It isn’t a bad thing to be a short linear story driven game. We Happy Few got scope creeped so hard into being a mess instead of the tight focused little story it could have been.
Yeah, I was never able to finish the game, gave up halfway through Sally's storyline and completely missed Ollie's story (which I think looks like the best) They really should not have made it open world and with the survival crafting elements. The game would have been incredible if they tightened it down and made it more like hopping from level to level.
@@KaiWolf18my brother did the same thing, i was just watching but Sally's guilt mechanic killed me. So many clunky mechanics all over tbh. The random ass maps for each chapter were whack too
@@sketchysketches381 See, I was okay with the guilt mechanic. Was a little annoying but I figured the main quests would always keep sending me back near her home so it wouldn't be too inconvenient to just pop in and feed the baby. What got me was just the boring running around outside of the main areas. I had spent the last 20 hours as Arthur trying to 100% the game by doing every sidequest and just got so sick of the game by that point. When I finished his story to only realize I had a whole 'nother one to do I was just burnt out. Couldn't take all the endless running around back and forth. I thought Sally's was the end, didn't even know Ollie had a story.
I feel like if they had the resources (and willpower) for it, they could go back and add some polish to the mechanics and gameplay to make it not as arduous. I’d love for another “No Man’s Sky” story of ultimate redemption, because the story and way it was presented (at least here) genuinely is told beautifully!
11:22 if memory serves, there was another major difference. It wasn’t Nazi Germany but Imperial Germany that won. I don’t remember if they addressed HOW, but Kaiser Wilhelm II wasn’t removed after WWI and his son reigned after him. I think there was also a war with the Soviet Union that may or may not still be going on as of the time of the game.
I was going to mention, recruiting conquered peoples as a homogenization tactic is much more in line with something Imperial Germany would do, in order to instill a unified Germanic identity.
I think I disagree about your take on Arthur’s ending. I read it as being about how sometimes you are simply too late to make up for your wrongs, and you just have to move on and do your best to be better. He doesn’t change until at the end when he stopped chasing what was never going to be (reuniting with the brother he betrayed) and decided to keep going even though he can’t undo what he did. “Life keeps going, *that* is the mercy.”
yes - arthur is living in the past the whole game, from his issues with his brother to his issues with sally. the entire game is themed around facing painful memories and moving on from them to do better.
Agreed. That's Arthur's entire arc throughout the story. For him to realize and accept what a piece of shit he is and grow as a person. A growth that was stunted by years of joy abuse
It's kinda funny how high the dialogue changes went over your head. They're so glaringly different and the baby line especially is a notable absence in act one, it seems kind of a given that the issue is that both characters are experiencing those scenes differently, Arthur brushes off the baby because he just doesn't hear her say that line, or immediately forgets it. Makes sense if he's only recently stopped taking Joy and is still recovering from the effects and thus it's still affecting his perception. But I guess sometimes even obvious stuff gets past us sometimes.
The constable at the end is a nice explanation for Arthur’s arc throughout the game. He doesn’t deserve forgiveness. But, with his new freedom, he has the choice of what he wants to do, stay the shitty person he is or grow up as a person and try to gain forgiveness in the future. As the constable says: Life goes on, that is the mercy
53:10 I think the intention is that they are both misremembering the conversation in a specific way that pushes more to what they wanted to happen in that interaction. Sally’s version makes Arthur seem less in the right and Vice versa.
For how thourough this analysis I didn't expect him to miss that. Of course both of these people (especially Arthur and his Joy-withdrawn brain) remember (or choose to remember) their version of the story that makes them look like the righteous one. (Although tbd it would be more evident if the space continuity was kept, i.e. they at least agreed on who reached out to who and where). It also explains why Sally seems so much better than the rest; she had gone through real trauma but we only learn of her from her own act, only through the lens of said trauma, and apparently long after the events that make all the men in her life decide she's a horrible person. She is definitely at least partially been exploited a lot but we can never be sure we have the full side of the story.
People sometimes complain about railroading in videogames, but I think that such a big story would've benefited from some rails. This is the first time I've experienced the story and it's phenomenal!
A-FUCKING-MEN I always thought this. I honestly feel so validated. The only reason any of them can be considered the 'good guys' is because they are the only ones in the town willing to even try facing down their pasts.
The message of the game, as far as I see it, is that in life there is no such thing as good and bad. On a philosophical level, it was only ever tyranny vs. freedom. On a character level, there was only ever tough choices to make. The characters irrational unraveling of those choices is where the game picks up. Ultimately I feel like you nailed it with your conclusion, and that is it is more admirable to face your consequences than it is to live a lie. What a goosebump raising story this was
Didn't like half the town chose to not forget their pasts? The downers? Some of them tried to be better, but not everyone, and most people can actually fight the system, but they didn't accept it for what it is, they didn't chose to forget and act like the past never happened.
@@3bodYking99 off of memory, very few chose to fight. Most people, presumably, had no idea they were being drugged to make them oblivious to the truth. Off memory, only few people suspected something was wrong. Of those few, only some chose to come to terms with reality in their own way. I don't believe there was ever a true epiphany of the masses that totally understood what was taking place. Whenever someone was withdrawaling, regardless of how tragic it was around them, all they were concerned about was the next dose. Speaking about this more in depth made me realize how scary some of these parallels are to real life
@@justinkyle4052 i am not talking about an uprising or any real fight. I am talking about the whole purpose of the garden, and most of it's occupants. The refused joy because they didn't want to forget or be fake happy, and they were banished to the garden.
@@3bodYking99 oh, that's right! The outcast of their society... I forgot they were called the downers. I thought you meant that in general because anyone who was withdrawaling always got referred to as a downer. I do remember at times feeling like the downers should of been on drugs. Not because I wanted them to be like everyone else in town but because they were a bit delusional and even borderline schizophrenic and extremely volatile. Anyways, great point. I'm not really sure what came of that story arch. Like if there was ever any reconciliation and cooperation. I remember the ending of the last dlc where the main character takes down the entire drug supply and everyone hates her for it. Not to get off topic but that last dlc is real trippy because it's hard to tell if she wasn't hallucinating the whole thing and it was just all in her head. There is a theory out there that paints this picture, using previous dlc to line up it's timeline. If that's the case, that if in fact the last dlc was nothing more than her coming off of drugs and hallucinating the whole time, then I'd imagine that fundamentally nothing has changed for anyone.
The change in dialogue are meant to show the effects of the joy and how their withdrawal made everyone’s memory of the situation all fuzzy, at least that’s what I’ve heard
Yeah I think that what is interesting about Arthur's character is that he is the one most affected by Joy's normal effects. Sally has seemingly maintained her mind and sanity and Ollie got that big dose that broke his brain entirely. But Arthur is someone who has been taking the stuff regularly for well over a decade and seemingly is only just now coming off of it, and as such he reveals exactly what Joy has been doing to people, which becomes more clear in Act 2 when you see things outside of his perspective. Like for instance I think that the reason why he's such a selfish prick is because he's basically stopped evolving mentally ever since he was a teenager. In the real world it's somewhat understandable that someone his age at the time might not have put together what *really* happened between Sally and his dad, so he would throw a fit and blame her when it's clearly not her fault. But over time as he gets older and more mature he would almost certainly at some point put 2 and 2 together and let go of his resentment towards her. Instead though he's been taking a Joy since then, which means that he's been in a brainfog his entire life and never grown mentally past that point. He's never been able to reflect on his past because Joy causes him to always warp events to paint himself in the best possible light as that would be the least sad thing to consider. So He just keeps assuming it was Sally's fault for "cheating" on him. He forgets he was lying to get his brother taken away, etc etc. And of course even after he stops taking the pills he's still under its effects. Just cause you quit taking drugs cold turkey doesn't mean it magically stops affecting you, especially when you've been in a brain fog for over a decade. So that explains the inconsistencies with the cutscenes. He interprets the conversation flowing much more naturally towards focusing on his own trauma when in reality he just brings it up out of nowhere. He ignores the baby because it's easier for him to justify leaving without her. I mean this is reinforced with Ollie too, seeing as his Joy overdose causes him to completely reverse his trauma so that the bad thing happened *to* him instead of *by* him. And hell even the gamemode where you play as a cop as well since it's revealed that the cops think they're just "peacefully" subduing people and everything will go back to normal so that they can ignore the horrors they're inflicting on others. The lesson is that the concept of ignoring your Trauma through Joy is an inherently selfish concept. Instead of acknowledging your trauma you're just pushing past it and hoping it goes away. Why think about bad things when you can think about good things instead? After all Surely if anything bad is happening, someone else will take care of it. But that's the problem, when *Everyone* is forced into that mindset by Joy, and when everyone is trying to offload their trauma and negative feelings onto others, nobody is left to actually address those problems and traumas and they just keep piling up, until eventually everyone realizes that the food is running out because nobody can be bothered to acknowledge that someone has to actually deal with the city's problems. So yeah I think it makes sense that Arthur, the stand in for what the everyman in this city is like, would also be the most selfish of the protagonists. The irony of course is that he was so selfish that he left the city, right as things were about to change thanks to Ollie's Selflessness, and if he had stuck around he might have been able to help make a difference. As opposed to how despite leaving, he acknowledges that there's nothing he can actually do for his brother at this point.
This was what was missed big time in the video’s analysis and I’m glad I’m seeing a lot of comments mentioning this. From what I saw of Act II, it really builds upon what was set up about Arthur in Act I (a lot of very interesting consequences you mentioned in your comment) and shows through Sally that not much has changed in this brave new world’s corrupt backend regarding gender dynamics. Characterwise, it fleshes Sally’s daily concerns out as being SO completely detached from the normal folks on Joy that it’s hard for her to follow Arthur’s conversation at all. Maybe Arthur was less awkward in the true conversation, but Sally was thrown off so much by how he came in swinging w/ a bunch of heavy shit she has no context for AND this phase from her childhood that he has such a completely different perspective on - holy shit! The implications are wild! Act II good
It kind of shocks me that there isn't more challenge in this comment section to the narrative that Sally cheated. The anger towards her is just wild. Sally didn't cheat, Sally was a child, she was a child the same age as this man's son, being raised as his adoptive daughter. I've seen people in the comments arguing about whether it was consentual, a child cannot give consent, especially not to an adult, and on top of that, an adult that has been grooming them. Arthur's father is a gro0mer, a p€dophile, and a child r@pist. Sally is a victim who is throughout the story being blamed for being taken advantage of, the story does very little to contest this perspective, but it blows my mind a little that folks are so willing to accept this narrative without challenging it.
Really? I’ve mostly seen defenses for her. Honestly, most people seem to think she was either a helpless child or an adolescent that would otherwise have been capable of better decisions, but was groomed into the wrong ones. I fall in the latter camp. She wasn’t a child, adolescents aren’t children. We’re old enough to start making more matured decisions than children are capable of, but we’re not as matured and a lot less experienced than adults, especially adults as old as Arthur’s dad. I think that’s the sticking point for a lot of people, because she could have made a different choice, but given her circumstances, it’s far more realistic that what ended up happening did. Don’t get me wrong, I agree she was groomed and therefore not in the wrong, but it’s misleading to say she was a child.
Seriously this comment section is so disgusting. So many people saying "it was her choice" "she wasn't a child" "both are wrong, but she wasn't forced" "she chose to cheat." I guess there are just so many misogynists who think "woman not honest = it's all her fault". The justifications are crazy!
Don't forget that Sally, a sexual assault survivor, is forced within the game to hold and feed her baby to improve her stats. In this dystopia women are still only mothers and housewives and even a fucking protagonist can't be something beyond that. They celebrated her trauma and made her use it without adressing the disgusting rape that happened.
@@DannyDevitoOffical-TrustMeBro Minors cannot consent to adults, ever. If I notice a minor attempting a flirt I'll shut it down in this very second and tell them to fuck off. It's our adult responsibility to put kids and teenagers into place for their sake.
I feel like the changes in the conversations with Sally and Arthur between acts 1 and 2 is because we’re looking through a different perspective. Sally remembers them in a much worse light
It also really shouldn’t have been early access if the story had a lot of hype people would’ve bought it for that. But making it EA just turned ppl off when they saw the gameplay was different from what they want it stops a consumer from returning
He convinced himself he didnt betray his brother for years and ypu are CONVINCED he wouldnt lie to himself about knowing about the baby? Great video besides your take on the different perspectives
WAIT JUST A MOMENT, ok so the city is called Hamlyn, right? Well, that's the name of the city in the story of the pied piper, isn't it? And what did the Germans do? THEY TOOK THE KIDS AWAY.
I feel like the procedurally generated maps could have been a really cool addition as a challenge. Like if you take too much joy the world literally changes to replicate the memory loss the player experiences Or the number of items in your inventory chamges or something Would have been frustrating to play through but it would add a consequence for taking joy
Really glad I'm not alone on this. I'm right there with you! I adore this game and loved the story of it all. I never really encountered any problems gameplay wise and the only times I felt it got slow or stuck was usually bc of my own stupidity lol. I especially like how with each story you play, you watch the world crumble around you as the Joy completely takes over everything.
So many people complain about this game, and I do understand their frustrations and agree that it definitely has flaws, but man, I love this game. I had so much fun playing and I fell in love with the story. So much to explore, discover, and experience.
I love the idea of the dialog changes, though I admit most could have been done better. I actually really like when they first meet, and he THINKS she asked about him when she was talking about herself. He is shellfish enough that it makes perfect sense he would assume she would ask more about him even if she said something else.
Bro… the fact about The Make Believes genuinely made my jaw drop. I’ve always wanted to play this game but never had the console to do so, so that was.. wow, I’m genuinely so shocked and have been listening to them since 2018! (The year it was made) I’m so baffled wow
1:25:22 Yeah I think a big thing with all of the characters if how they each focus on a different person/group of people. Arthur’s main goal is himself, he wants to escape, no matter the cost. Sally’s goal is her daughter, she wants to escape to give her daughter a life she couldn’t have had. And Ollie’s goal is the town itself, to save everybody from drugging themselves to death pretty much. Sure Ollie was a bad person, but overall what he ended up doing in his story was a very noble thing. The same can’t exactly be said about Arthur. We also have to consider that what Arthur did to his brother was intentional, while what Ollie did to Jacks daughter wasn’t entirely intentional. Arthur knew what would’ve happened if his brother arrived in Germany, but Ollie didn’t know that Jacks daughter would’ve just been shot. It doesn’t make what he did any better, but it’s still something to consider
I have to say, having all of the TV episodes be reruns is... Actually pretty smart. There's a reason for the repetitiveness, and they don't have to make an INSANE amount of them for the game.
@@simstophat1078 "A minor usually refers to a person under the age of 18, but can also refer to any person under the 'legal age' for certain activities." Please refer to the definition from a law firm. I can lose a finger and still have fingers, Just like a I can be of age of majority for some things and be a minor for others.
I think the dialogue changes are based on the actual character we’re playing. Like Arthur purposefully ignored the baby because of his selfishness and blamed her more on his side. That’s what I picked up at least
A small theory I got about dialogue changes between acts. I believe its different because each characters perspective is so skewed in their own head that the dialogue changes just to better fit their own narrative in their head. It make's a lot of sense especially for Arthur, being so selfish and entitled to the point of completely blanking out things that would make him look worse or changing the conversation to make it feel like someone asked him. I am very tired as of writing this, so I hope I could properly express my thoughts on it
This comment is exactly what I was thinking. Everyone keeps talking about minute “continuity errors” as if that completely takes away from the “unreliable narrator” trope in the game entirely driven on twisting the truth and pretending things are what they aren’t.
Not to mention a potential biproduct of having only *just recently* stopping the consumption of Joy when his adventure began. It's sure to have fucked with Arthur's more "negative" memory and general perception, just as it fucks with everyone else's in Wellington Wells.
I think the conversations change between acts as joy f-s up your memory and it might just be how the different characters remember it. And Ollie is just… Ollie.
Great video! I thought it was interesting that you hated the conversation changes with arthur so much, because I rather liked them. To me it exemplified the extent to which arthur was lying to himself, even off joy he is ever the unreliable narrator. The way I see it, Arthur was so shocked by Sally's admission that she had a baby that his mind just refused to process the info at all. It just adds another tally to the things he'll regret when he remembers them. Or maybe he won't, considering he's still mad at her for being effectively a victim of statutory rape at the hands of his dad.
Bonus thoughts, Arthur is a compulsive liar. Beyond the different vignettes caused by his on/off relationship with hardcore psychedelics. And he’s absolutely willing to lie to himself and intentionally misinterpret or misremember events for his own comfort and ego. Also, there’s no real guarantee that Sally’s a reliable narrator either. No strong reason to doubt her either, mind, but it would track with the rest of the characterisations.
Not exactly what I thought but I also had the maybe they're unreliable narrators thought. It would definitely fit in with what the story is trying to tell because the lines being different off of a mistake doesnt seem to make sense either with how well the story is done. I can't imagine it would have been hard to check what was written line for line in those scenes, and they pribably did considering some lines were the same.
I like to think the dialogue changes between acts show how everyone remembers things completely differently, it's a heavy theme through the story, most prominently with Arthur misremembering the train incident multiple times. All the characters are unreliable narrators so they remember each interaction differently, Sally remembers seeing Arthur and making conversation only for him to butt in with his own problems and storm off like a man child, she seeks him out and offers him the letter in exchange for a favor, etc. However Arthur on the other hand is quite selfish and tends to already have some issues remembering certain details of an event (as seen with Percy) so I think his selfishness makes him remember the situation as Sally asking him what got him off his joy, him having to do a whole bunch of work to seek Sally out and apologize only for her to ask for a favor to get the letter, his memory tries to make him feel like a better person than he actually is when we play as him
There is an alternate universe where We happy few is a book/movie. And I think that would be a better that way. It probably would have become a modern classic.
I actually DO like that the characters POV differs on the same conversation. Considering neither of them are particularly good people and neither of them are completely sane (on or off their Joy), they are also not reliable narrators.
Personally, if the gameplay didn’t weight it down, this game could have been up to dark souls status, it really was a amazing concept, and the story is fantastic, just wished the gameplay was better, but for a game company that was barely known, it’s pretty impressive.
It doesn't even need better gameplay, the game could remove the gameplay and focus entirely on the story, cutting off the dead weight. People can't complain about a walking simulator when it is literally advertised as such.
What fucks me up about Sally’s story is how she’s expected to just hold everyone else’s emotions for them. She doesn’t have the “luxury” to take joy and forget, because she has to survive. And to survive means to hold all of these awful feelings and memories for everyone else’s sake. She’s the one who soothes over the hurt of the evil men who “do bad things for the greater good” with sex and drugs. And with Arthur, she has to sit there and take it as he berates her for being sexually abused, as if he was the victim, because she is the one who had to emotionally process it for the both of them while Arthur could afford to suppress it and never grow up. Not to be all cringe with “aS a wOMaN” but I feel like it ties into the story very well, that when bad emotions and memories are suppressed bad things happen. And in this case, it’s an example of how the thankless job of processing society’s trauma has often fallen onto women. The society in this game would fall apart without people like Sally, and all she gets in return is to be abused and berated.
so i had this half-in-the-background when it got to the part with the DLC and i was like "wow that rockstar's voice acting is really good" then it went a little farther and i was like "wait that sounds familiar" i looked it up. it's neil newbon. astarion, elijah kamski, gavin reed, heisenberg. just won best performance at the game awards. how is it that this game picked up such consistently good voice actors? i'm shook, this game has No Right
1:31:16 The "Fake joy" thing is actually technically in the game in the form of sunshine. A pill that makes you look like your on joy, even to detectors, but has none of joys effects.
Yeah!! Annoying that he just acted luke that wasn't a thing despite being important in Sally's act but I guess it lines up w him not remembering any of the gameplay lol
I was into the game when it first came out but I had no clue how deep the sally/Arthur plot went. Sally was a child, a victim. And I think Arthur’s insane for not being able to see that 14 years later
I like to think it's cuz of him being addicted to joy for so long that he never got the chance to mature, it would make a really compelling narrative to discuss the developmental delay in children due to use of Joy. Like homeboys a grown man now but still doesn't have basic empathy. I feel so bad for Sally, I really hope it was an intentional choice to make Arthur such a douche and not them dropping the ball on a really fucked up situation
to be fair, unlike in a normal situation Arthur was seeing that 14 years later but likely didn't know during those 14 years, what with the foggy memories. that being said, the game makes it relatively clear that Arthur is very much intended to be a bad person, the ending practically spells it out, Arthurs two choices were to forget or to continue knowing who he really is... the kind of person that decides to sacrifices his brother for personal gain. so yeah, I'd say Arthur being a douche is intentional given his entire chapter is him remembering the awful thing he did to his brother, with layers of self deception being peeled off as the game progresses, from "I was too old" to "I told them they had my birthday wrong" to "I lied and told them they had my birthday wrong" to "I lied using my brothers passport that they had my birthday wrong tricking my brother into taking my spot".
I think the comment section is insane and not putting themselves in his shoes. You dont have to agree, just understand the position the character was written as.
Your video is one of the only videos that actually covers the ENTIRE story. I dug and dug for an explanation video for a couple years for this game and YOU are the FIRST to finally do it. This game is almost a decade old and y you're the first to cover the story in full. The only video just as close ignores the second act and skips it in a huff. I don't even think they covered Ollie's act. I'm honestly so happy to finally know the full story as I've always wanted to find out more on it, but no one ever bothers going in depth of it. The three acts are so fascinating. Honestly, with how act two and act one are with the scenes differences, it feels more like they animated the wrong scenes and put them in with the cut or changed dialogue, since they're not even in the same locations for the second two which is very odd and confusing. It makes me wonder if at some point the story was different and if you had to pick Arthur or Sally to be the character you played, especially since either way Ollie's story has to come last, but Arthur and Sally only overlap here and there but Arthur's story is still going on. I wish more was done for Sally though...She was a groomed victim and is shows. Event he way she flirts with Arthur slightly to get her way feels like a trait she had picked up from what happened as a child. For her, she already wore that mask even if it wasn't on since she suffered the most. She was abused by every man in her path and it's not till the end where she knows her daughter won't suffer that same fate where she feels to be her TRUE self. She isn't used to make medication or to satisfy a man physically, but she's a mother who loves her daughter and is strong enough to prove that she'd do anything for her when her own mother wouldn't. The first act is about a man who was selfish and let his past ruin him, but even so doesn't change and will forever linger on those faults, the second is of someone moving on and breaking a cycle, and the third is moving on from the past, but still living with it in freedom. It makes me a bit sad we couldn't have a sequel with a happier ending after the last dlc, but it's understandable. Honestly, the dystopian retro European/London colorful feel is rad ngl, wish more games used it!
I really like how the endings for each character sort of grows in scope from the previous. Arthur escapes bringing change to his life, Sally escapes bringing change to her and her babies life, and Ollie escapes possibly changing the lives of the people on the island.
I actually REALLY LIKE the fact that the scenes between Act 1 and Act 2 are so different. You wanna know why? If you've ever watched a certain video on a certain game called *Pathologic* you'll know that depending on the character you choose, the personality of the characters changes. With Daniil, if you're playing as him, you get a snobby guy who thinks he's better than everyone. But if you're playing as literally anyone else, Daniil suddenly becomes an EXTREMELY snobby MORON of an ASS who can never hold his tongue for more than 5 seconds and constantly interrupts people. Every character becomes a worse version of when You had been around to control them and help. Consider BOTH of these perspectives, now consider all the lines as how *THEY* perceive themselves! Remember; Joy warps conversations, and every person has a different understanding of their own stories. I imagine the NPCs talking is what they ACTUALLY say or atleast what the character you're playing as hears, but what you hear out of yourself when you're playing as them is what they *THINK* they're saying. Sally's lines are Much kinder and understanding when it's herself, and suddenly Arthur becomes a fucking ASSHOLE on the other side. BUT when you're playing AS Arthur, Sally is portrayed as the bad guy and that Arthur is just slightly less of a selfish _prick_ than he actually is. It's SUCH A GOOD DYNAMIC on how people *_PERCEIVE THEMSELVES!_* EDIT: And some follow-ups. I don't think you can expect a _selfish asshole_ to do more than the common courtesy of asking if there's anything he can do and then actually expect him to honor his word. He's a selfish asshole, he just said that so he didn't seem like one, but didn't actually have any intentions of doing so, which is why he doesn't ask from His perspective, because he doesn't actually mean it wink wink nudge nudge. As for Sally saying she has a baby... I don't actually know. I feel like there's a psychological reason behind that. I've felt like my words held more weight than they Actually did. Maybe she felt like she was saying something Super impactful like that, and then was just really excited to go with him as soon as possible, completely forgetting to Truly mention it to his face.
@@maintainrain same. I keep thinking about hbomberguy's video essay on pathologic while thinking about this game. Something about them feels so similiar... actually now that i think of the similiarities there are a lot, omg. the walking, boring gameplay but amazing story, several characters to play as and a lot more,,, omg. I assume the games being so similiar is a coincidence, but dang, they seem so similiar now that i think about it (coming from someone who has played neither game)
LMFAO i know this comment is from a few weeks ago but i JUST made a comment about the same thing. that video was so good, and i also thought the changes were amazing. youve explained it so well here plus i had basically the same idea about the "help offer" lol. to me it totally came across as him being like. "you want something dont you?" more than an actual offer of help.
Honestly, Sally's story with Arthur's dad just shows him to be an even worse person. She was SIXTEEN, a child in a very vulnerable situation. His father groomed her and took advantage of a child, and Arthur still blames HER for it. It's really sad and messed up when you stop to think about it for more than a few seconds. It wasn't her fault at all, she was a victim of abuse at the hands of Arthur's father, but he chooses to put the blame on her.
Arthur is a piece of shit as a person everyone knows about it. But Sally isn't great either, the game is about horrible persons, Sally could have tell him that she didn't want to do it, that she was forced to accept but rather than that she admits that he was cheating Arthur. Arthur is so self centered that you could say the signs were clear, but to him his girlfriend sleep with his dad on her own account. Sally didn't (far as i am aware) actually tried to tell Arthur that she was forced rather than that she actually admits it. Its complicated situation and the victim isn't helping to clear it up. How would you feel is your girlfriend/boyfriend suddenly sleeps with one of your parents and then they say "Yeah i cheated sorry" you're not gonna think "Well the situation of power in the household was in the favor of my parent, so they forced her to sleep with them" is just nuts you're gonna think that person is a Slut/Traitor/Cheater.
@@AgustinRamirez-wl4mg That's how I view the situation. From Arthur's perspective, he thinks Sally cheated on him with his dad. From Sally's perspective she was most likely coerced into sleeping with Arthurs dad (or r*ped). I just wish Sally told Arthur what really happened instead of letting him think she's a slut/cheater. Arthur could've been more understanding, but after losing his brother, Sally was all he had and I can see why catching Sally in the act would sour his feelings toward her.
@@AgustinRamirez-wl4mg do you really think Sally had a choice in the situation, a teenaged girl who lost her whole family, has no where else to go unless she wants to lose the one person she cares about. She lives under his house as people would say. Do you think that same teenager would've likely been easy to manipulate into thinking she enjoys and wants that attention (groomed) because she's in grief (because of losing her whole family). Again. He's the adult. He agreed to take her in. He had authority over her. Seriously, out of the two you could point your criticism to why are things hyperfocused on the person who has less blame in the situation, regardless of if you think she genuinely want to have sex with Arthur's dad.
@@flutterg1035 It's annoying how some people are that focused on arguing whether or not a *child* wanted to be molested by her father figure, as if the answer would make Mr Hastings any less of a predator... And yeah, that person is very wrong, Arthur is not justified in blaming Sally. They were both children, so when he walked in on them in bed together, he should have mainly been disgusted at his dad for sleeping with a child, like any normal person would be.
@@drifter2928everyone else seems to understand that if you're dating a partner the blame does change based on whether the action was consensual or not. It doesn't make Hastings less of a predator, it tells us whether she broke trust in a relationship...
It's tremendously ironic and sad that they wanted to make a game with no plot and all gameplay, then went on with adding a plot, and the end product would've been better if it was only plot all along. The only part which everyone praises is what wasn't intended to be there.
I have had vague memories of (what I now know to be) contrast for years now, and I had basically given up on finding the “weird shadow game where her parents get divorced but first her mom shoots him”, but I was NOT expecting to find it while watching a video essay about a game I also vaguely remember! But also, this video is amazing, keep up the good work!
Take it from somebody who's been on antidepressants, feeling only ONE emotion ALL the time with NO variation is the worst feeling you could possibly imagine.
@@obamagaming9456 You know what's even worse? The developers of We Happy Few once stated that Joy is mainly their commentary on anti-depressants (and/or opioids). In fact, according to the game itself, if the majority of people in a society have severe mental health problems, leaving them untreated will result in widespread addiction, and the entire society ultimately crumbling... I think. Given that Joy is supposed to be a metaphor for opiate medication, despite its effects being more along the lines of LSD crossed with amphetamines, this is definitely not the message the creators were trying to send.
The Make Believes are just incredible, I love that Compulsion spent the time to source the work from actual Canadian artists, their entire EP is just **mwah**
I know right?! When he brought them up and started to list off their songs I was like "I found these songs on my Spotify Discovery, I love these songs!" I had no idea they were for this game, goes to show how good the music is on it's own as well!
I think in Act II, the characterization of Arthur and the lies he tells himself are completely in line with his character so far. I don't think it's a line crossed because frankly he's shown to do worse throughout the story.
You really need to read A Brave New World! This game seems to have more similarities to that book than 1984, with the medication rather than the gin they drank and the “reeducation” in Well’s book
honestly, the concept is so cool, but like, it's one of the few concepts that make me want to tear up from it alone. you end up wasting away, blissfully unaware of your body's degradation, but you just keep smiling. and i wonder if like, anybody in wellington wells died of some sort of food poisoning by now. they were eating rat guts in the opening after all
I think they’re eye contacts that make you look like you’re zonked out on joy, the only weakness being that the doctors can smell joy(?) and will still try and force you to take it or straight up kill you
"those are the only changes though" to the dialogue, yes. but you didnt mention that arthur talking to sally in act 1 is in sally's house and in act 2 its in the garden district complete scene change
I think Arthur is my least favourite character but now that I think about it. Maybe Arthur was always unhappy. If you hear his voice when he was little, his tone is sad and he sounds intelligent for a 12 year old (sadly, I've seen that kind of behaviour in my little cousin who has a hard time dealing with her parents. She's so intelligent but she feels sad most of the time...). I also did the math and his mother dies when he's 12, so that's another reason. He's the one who has to take care of his brother now that his mother is dead and even if he loves Percy, he has to deal with a lot of things with just 12 years old, so when he sends Percy with the germans without thinking about the consequences (because, again, he's just a 12yo), he has another reason to feel like shit. He didn't have a good relationship with his father either. Then when he's 16, he found out his father was grooming Sally (but Arthur thinks Sally just wanted to do that). I understand why Arthur acts the way he does now. I'm not excusing the things he did/how he acted when he grew up but like this game showed us, people are neither black or white, we're different tones of gray. Arthur isn't completely bad either.
no i totally get that. i think arthur is morally grey. i think moat are, except sally. arthur did some pretty bad things throughout the course of the game, but i feel like, and this goes for honestly every character, you cant really blame them for wanting to escape, for wanting to feel happy. of course they do messed up things, and i like that the game doesnt necessarily demonise them, it just shows how they percieve themself and their actions
After receiving numerous comments, I'll have this comment pinned to clear some things up.
- Yes, Brave New World is an infinitely better comparison than 1984. I hadn't (and still haven't) read the book when I wrote this script.
- It was stupid of me to leave Sally's situation as ONLY "cheating". She was taken advantage of. That was an honest mistake, as it somehow slipped my mind her age when it went down.
- I made a statement saying it would be cool to have a fake Joy pill really late into the video. This exists. It's called Sunshine, and I feel like a complete moron for forgetting about it.
- The dialogue changes between act I and II were made to highlight the fact that both Arthur and Sally are unreliable narrators. I somehow did not realize this. I still think they're stupid and don't flow very well, just acknowledging the fact that I didn't include that information in the video.
Glad you see you recognized the unreliable narrator stuff.
Good on ya for aknowledging these, was a little puzzled that Sally's age wasn't brought up specially.
I adored this video, and I'm glad you clarified and defined some stuff here. I have a lot of personal issues with Sally's type of situation you mentioned here though so I'll almost glad that didn't make it into the video and catch me off guard.
I feel like you would had noticed that thing about the dialogue changes if you saw your whole video again in one sitting or if you had a new fresh pair of eyes. It's not really hard to notice
@@FlantisFroggubro editing videos is Hella draining, mans was probably nodding off rewatching footage
If they made hunger more of a pressing issue you could resort to Joy to eat stuff your character couldn't stomach while sober, like that rat at the beginning. If reality and inventory objects looked different on Joy, it could've made some puzzles really cool and helped the player get into the mindset of why not taking Joy is a struggle
This would have been such a great mechanic !!
reminds me of fran bow, how things look different after fran takes her pills
I could've sworn that hunger and thirst were more involved in the early alpha builds... but I might've popped a joy and misremembered some things from those years.
devs of this really should had played Pathologic
Yeah, this reminds me of Franbow, with the pill puzzle
Another sad thing about Arthur's story is that if you take the Oblivion pill, since arthur stays in the now desolate town, its very likely he starved to death or died of Joy withdrawal.
Definitely starved to death but no withdrawal since the pill is a lobotomy
He's also in the garden so the town now reject the joy users
@@danielmallory4687that or the entire town became desolate. Or Arthur just wandered into the Garden district and there’s no one left to stop him.
@@Mavuika_GyaruOblivion wasn't an lobotomy. Coconut Joy was supposed to be the new Joy type they would release but suffered hallucigenic issues due to the materials being used, and Oblivion just erased your memory completely, which is why Ollie struggles to remember certain things in the game (hence his visits to Sally Boyle). The brand new Joy that Verloc wanted to release but had no name for (A-124) was the lobotomizing drug (it wasn't yet in a pill form). Arthur definitely would have either died of starvation or would have gone back on his Joy after he returned, and died of thr withdrawals
@@ghostslayer1981 it was definitely a lobotomy. Hence why Arthur rode that fake rocket, presumably to death
Arthur doesn't shrug off Sally's line, he doesn't hear it, he doesn't even think he's in the garden district, he's taken joy too often to notice stuff like that. Arthur's effectively delusional whereas Sally isn't
oh, that's an interesting take. didn't arthurs pov of that scene take place inside sallys house, or am i the one who's high, lol
i swear it was a different setting at least.
i had wondered about that but thought maybe it was just that you could start the conversation in different places as i haven't played the game myself.
Arthur has the hallmarks of an abuser, and someone who always looks the best in their own mind. His POV showed himself in the best light, and he still came off as an ass. Imagine how much worse he actually was.
Why would he risk everything for someone else's child? They are in a survival situation where a baby is a huge danger and drain on everyone involved. it's not like humanity is going extinct or anything either so the child isn't even that important. She also proved herself unreliable to him before. I wouldn't take a cheating ex with a random child with her back in our current world. Why would he in that world?
He seems very lucid, just annoyed she told him about the baby because now he will look worse for leaving.
@magmaslug9305 "Don't want to be a cuckold? Must be an incel r***ist!" - zoomer idiots
@@magmaslug9305 You're the last person I'd ever want to be stuck with in a serious situation. You sound like an awful person. Like you'd stab me in the back the moment it was even slightly more convenient for you to do so than be a decent human being. No value for anyone or anything other than yourself and the things that are useful to you.
The village being named Hamlyn immediately set my brain off; brilliant detail for the writers to include. 'Hamelin' (pronounced the same way) happens to be the name of the village in the Pied Piper story, AKA the one where a man plays a tune that lures away all of the village's children and drowns them in the river.
OMG! That's such a cool catch
Amanda…
And there’s a big statue of the Pied Piper in the game! Big ol’ jester being followed by a lot of rats.
After he wasn't paid for killing the rats raiding the village. Context matters.
@@falconeshield …
I kinda thought the dialogue changes were cool, if a little mishandled. The idea was there, painting the both of them as unreliable narrators. Sally seemingly unable to understand why Arthur is so upset, so she remembers him as being completely unreasonable, and Arthur ignoring important details such as the baby just because he's so self-centered and whingy. Maybe they changed too many unimportant details, but maybe that was just to let you obviously know that things were different.
In retrospect, I probably should have realized that that’s what they were doing.
@@abbsynthe I remember somethings charging around like the lightbringer being dead in Arthur's run and unconscious in Sally playthught
Bro she was 16 and the father was an adult. Are we pretending that isn't a factor here?
@@LuffyBlack idk what that has to do at all with what I said, I wasn't saying that the whole shebang wasn't bad, I'm just saying she personally probably felt that Arthur was overreacting to what she's been trying to forget about. And besides I don't think Arthur cared about the illegal age gap, he only cared that she betrayed him, cause that's his whole character, being self-centered. Again, idk wtf you're talking about or what I'm "pretending" cause that has no relation to what I said
I do like that interpretation.
Arthur says in his letter “what lies will I tell myself about her” and her POV in their conversations is different then his, because he IS an unreliable narrator. That’s the point. Arthur was so caught up with himself and his delusions.
they both are, in fact the whole world is. You can't have a reliable narrator in a world in EVERYONE is affected under their system
He is after all revealed to be the type of person who condemned his mentally handicapped brother to die to save his own skin while repressing that memory extremely hard to avoid the guilt. And that was without joy.
@@joshuakim5240yup, he took his brother, who wouldn't even NEED to go because of his age, to convince him that they will "go togethe" because they can care for eachother, only to use his brother's passports to make them think he was only there to deliver his younger brother, and that he is a mentally handicapped kid who wouldn't even be that helpful.
But she's an unreliable narrator too since she's been on Joy just as long and didn't stop taking it during that exchange. Not saying that exonerates Arthur, if anything I feel his behavior was even worse than either of them care to admit or want to remember.
@@FlameDarkfirewouldn't she have had to stop taking joy to get pregnant?
I honestly think We Happy Few would make an incredible web series, or maybe something released on a streaming service. It’s such a compelling story, and, if properly adapted, I think it could get the love it deserves.
Fully agree with you!
this is so true, it could be a great miniseries!!!
Feels like the heavy theme of drugs would make the series get banned in a whole lot of countries though
@@aquatech1753I feel like most streaming services would meddle with it so much, that it’d be sanitized to the point where it’d be banned in only like 2 countries for one or two things. The rest of the countries wouldn’t bother with it, cause it was meddled with so much to point where it’s not even good anymore.
I still don't understand why it has to take place in post nazi world conquest
“ I wish I still believed in some sort of mercy”
“Life goes on, that IS the mercy”
CHILLS
RIGHT THAT LINE WAS SOOOO GOOD
That entire scene was magnificent. Arthur confronting his past and reconciling with the fact that yes he is an absolute garbage human being, the bobby sharing words of wisdom and helping him reflect and work through it. Masterful!
the reveal that she had been assaulted by his father and he considered that cheating put me permanently on the Arthur hate train
@@JetstreamTheSexSamdude, you do realize that women have been taught to blame themselves for sexual assault and r*pe for thousands of years right? That craps' been perpetuated since before the Bible.
@@JetstreamTheSexSamit’s unfortunately common for victims of sexual assault to blame themselves. I can’t say if that’s what the writers were trying to convey, but it’s the only decent way to read the situation. A grown man and a 16 year old girl is not a healthy, consensual relationship, no matter the intent of the writers.
@snowyd5136 I don't care if a 16 year old is actively asking older men to have sex with them, the blame is on the adult man with a 16 year old and a wife choosing to have sex with a teenager.
@@JetstreamTheSexSamso you’re just a weirdo then. Or you’re just too dim to understand unhealthy power dynamics
A 16 year old does not have sex with an adult. That is called rape
@snowyd5136 I'm sorry. Why are you acting like Arthur's dad isn't a fully developed adult with a fully developed brain. Who took in this child to take care of because she had nothing? That's what gets me. Yall don't wanna focus on the person who is in the wrong no matter how you slice it. Why is it that the child gets criticised but the grown adult doesn't???
"Life goes on. THAT is the mercy."
That line caught me really off-guard, wow.
Its very true no matter what pain you have created for anyone including yourselves being alive leaves the door open to positives reminds me of one anime scene where a character says they have nothing inside them but then are told every reason some feels joy because of them
yeah.. i feel ya...
@@senritsujumpsuit6021 are you talking about Re zero?
@@nabinoorshahil2715 yes
but when it's only filled with resentment, pain, suffering. Death will looks like mercy
Honestly Sally’s story should’ve touched on the so called “cheating” more. She was taken advantage of but they both refer to it as cheating and is subsequently the reason why Sally can even get Arthur what he wants.
Yeah what the actual fuck why isnt it referred to as assault even once
@@Causticksprobably cause of the time period it's set in, misogyny and all that. I don't doubt that rape was extremely common given that the police were corrupt and unsympathetic, society hadn't progressed in decades, the widespread usage of joy probably made remembering it happening difficult for the victim, and if you did manage to remember you'd be beat to death or exiled for being a 'downer'.
Not really. It is representation of the time period. Nowadays people called that by it's name, but in the past you was at fault for your own demise.
It's actually would ruin everything if they looked deeper into this or tried to show it's in modern view point.
Even more this is just another way to erases the history. We gonna keep repeat the same mistake if we gonna act like this time period never existed. So, they did the right thing to keep it this way. It's just shows how the past mindset with WW2 can scar people.
@@Pihsrosnec She probably suppresses how bad it was for her as well though, since it's difficult to fully process what happened. I think it could've still been possible to make it more obvious that Sally isn't the one "at fault," that rather she was taken advantage of and assaulted.
@@Causticksprobably because the game expects you to be smart enough to already know that, and to understand that everyone around her can continue to deny what happened to her while she’s still pushed into the role of “comforting older men with drugs and sex” in order to survive. Her ending is her finally escaping from it.
It kills me hearing Percy calling for his brother on the train. KILLS ME. Hearing this poor kid scream hurts my soul.
The VA for Percy was so damn good, the screams of anguish
Same now I just hate Arthur
if you’ve ever had a disabled friend or loved one you know that decision Arthur made to abandon Percy makes sense but no one would do it you have to be bottom of the bottom but the emotional tropes in this game hit so hard
"I trust you, Arthur"
@@snipeyounoobzyee2662it doesnt make sense, hes a jerk
"ignore the screaming i threw a molotov into a group of people"
right then, as you were
The reveal with Ollie’s side of the conversation was actually amazing. Him saying “you could never forget something like that” sounded almost like a response to Arthur but just weird enough to make you question what’s going on, until you see his perspective
1:31:20
Fun Fact: There is an actual "fake joy" in the game. It's called sunshine and is actually what Sally has been taking alongside the blackberry she makes herself. It's a pill in a similar shape to ecstasy but with a sun symbol stamped on it. If you use it instead of Joy, people will still think you're on Joy (i.e, detector booths, bobbies, wellies) but you'll have no withdrawals and the filter will be different from the normal pink Joy.
How did she deliver a baby tho? It's not so easy to hide a birth happening.
@@hayana-sanjo There's a group of three witches living in the garden district. They gave her a choice, let them help deliver the baby and they'll continue to help Sally through her journey or abort it prematurely and she'll get no help from them
@@hayana-sanjodespite what the media loves to indicate, it IS possible to deliver a baby alone, as long as there are no complications (like something tearing and you sitting there, bleeding out).
It's a sad example, but consider how many stories there are each year of a teenage girl delivering a baby in a bathroom, then throwing the baby away. She does it completely alone then, doesn't she? Concealing her secret shame from the world... there's a girl who was just sentenced for killing her baby in such a way...
@@hayana-sanjo when you're a key member in an operation that requires little active presence, and the bulk of your team is a bunch of druggies that won't remeber things in a couple of days, it's a lot more immediate. just say that she came with a stomach bug, and you have basically a free month
@@hayana-sanjo I mean everyone was drugged out of their minds, so not like it wasn't impossible. With an easy enough birth, no one might've noticed the difference. (I suppose even she could've taken Joy during it in order to make it more bearable and not be screaming or something.)
The moral of We Happy Few is really that procedural generation should NOT be seen as a selling point, but rather a potentially useful tool in an artist's arsenal. A game like We Happy Few would've benefited greatly from BioShock's map design philosophy. Large, open hubs. Unfortunately it was developed at a time where games were touting "unlimited replay potential" thanks to procedural generation.
I feel like it would've been a better game if it shifted its focus into being either a Metroidvania with semi-open-world elements or incorporating an immersive sim philosophy inspired by Deus Ex and Dishonored, in which the game world is split into a series of self-contained, mission-focused areas with handcrafted level designs where different types of objectives can be approached in numerous ways depending on your playstyle. The biggest problem with We Happy Few was that despite having a solid foundation for story, characters, setting, and worldbuilding, it can't even decide what type of gameplay was it trying to be. Was it a linear story-driven action-adventure game? Or an open-world survival crafting game with roguelike elements?
@Noelle_Holiday no part of this game is RPG. Has people's perception of the genre been so diluted, that they think this game and Final Fantasy are at all similar?
It originally had handmade areas in early access but that was changed to procedural which made it way worse. Stranded deep did the opposite they noticed low quality in procedural generation so they changed to hand making the area. We have learnt if your a big or small team 90% of the time procedural generation isn't going to work
I remember when the trailer for this game was released, I was super excited. I was expecting something like bioshock; and immersive sim, close corridors and fun combat. What was released was something very different, and I didn't like the game. It would have been cool to have something like that with this story but it's whatever. Cool game nevertheless
Procedural Generation is something that is designed mainly for sandbox and roguelike games, where the whole concept is starting from nothing in a random environment and planning towards an end goal.
We Happy Few could work with the idea if it was mainly focused on gameplay, leaning on the roguelike/survival elements, but a story focus like it has doesn't work.
There actually is a "fake joy" that Sally literally gives you during Authur's questline. It's a special drug called Sunshine which makes you look like you're on Joy, without actually being on it.
cant blame them too much, making a modern day britain simulator is no easy feat
What do you think about Bloodborne? It's an older game tho
@@hanayuna4 The most accurate simulation of modern-day Britain
Shoulda implemented advanced sword combat
honestly accurate britain sim
*SHAMK*
I remember watching Jacksepticeye play the first few minutes of the game. The intro was so compelling and stuck with me, but never saw the full story. Just that small concept. It's a shame really, truly an interesting story weighed down by a Bad Game. Because I didn't pursue looking for the rest of the game after seeing my favourite youtubers stop playing it, since the gameplay was a bore to watch too.
I had the exact same experience! Right down to watching that same let's play. I suppose I'm watching this video to see how it was supposed to end.
Same. I remember watching 8BitRyan play an early version of it when I was younger, and I was immediately interested. Fantastic introduction and worldbuilding.
@@Onezy05 Well another 8BitRyan watcher. Didn't expect to find one out here,
Jack fell off tho fr
@@ryanphillips4123he finished it?
As someone who has struggled with addiction for much of my life the description of joy really hits home. That guy saying “it doesn’t make you forget, just fuzzy around the edges so you can pretend it’s okay” is a pov I am very familiar with
Same. i was on meth back in the day for more years than i want to admit and it was all to forget the past. I've been clean now for 6 years and the memories still burn painfully but afraid as i am of the memories, i'm more afraid of becoming 'that person' again. Life goes on.
@@fluttershystayshigh4202I know that i'm just a completely random person on the planet, but i'm proud of you. Thats no easy feat, so be sure to give yourself a pat on the shoulder now and then❤
@@dissrapsare you like... 9 years old? If you're grown, please get off the platform and reevaluate your life choices.
What sucks about Arthur & Sally is that when Arthur's Dad takes Sally in as a minor when she has nowhere else to go, coercing her into sex, teaching her the pattern she follows in the game of trading bodily autonomy for safety, etc... Arthur reacts like a teenage boy in the 1960s without a lot of emotional intelligence or awareness of others (and as we know from his main storyline, general selfishness) who just had his heart broken by the girl he liked. Rage, refusal to listen or empathize, hurt, spite, disgust, etc.
But where the real tragedy lies is that he then takes Joy for 15 years, and doesn't ever have a chance to think about why that situation might have been f*cked on her side, or develop empathy, or just generally emotionally mature.
He IS a man-child who lives in a state of permanent arrested development. How could he not be? When would he have had the opportunity to grow?
He frustrates the hell out of me and is my least favorite of all three protagonists. He's fantastically written.
So spot on. Always living in the past.
Yeah that's what I thought about arthur, he's all screwed up in the head from all the joy and the only thing he really remembers from the "cheating" incident is probably his feeling of rage and betrayal that he felt from when he was a teenage boy. Also doesn't help that sally, being a groomed victim thought that she's at fault and can't slap him with the cold hard truth of how much of a pos his dad actually is
I came to the conclusion that Arthur's dad is the worst character of the story. I mean, you have to be an asshole if your child turns out to be so selfish and unsympathetic, and then what he did to Sally...
It never says she was coerced or forced into sex. Every character has a flaw and something that they did wrong. Sallys was sleeping with her boyfriends dad and continuing to use her body to gain power by sleeping with the general.
Nah sally is a whole ho who deserves nothing but the worst
Aurthers ending, after the whole story just makes sense. He was a terrible person who did terrible things and now, he gets to properly feel terrible. It isn't a good or bad ending, it's a new beginning. A time for him to see himself for who he is and too at the very least never do it again. The choice is a simple "good" vs "bad", to forget and too regress into a child or to grow and become an adult.
Honestly, it is a pretty bad ending but I guess it makes sense in a way it’s just pretty shitty
The constable outright says it,
'Life goes on. THAT is the mercy'
It's up to Arthur to take it or leave it
I think the entire 'Arthur is the worst person' segment of the video was unnecessary. Yes, he is a terrible person. Does that make his story less compelling? No! His end is him realizing just how terrible he truly is, his arc ends where others start. Yes his ending doesn't have any greater significance for the people of the city, but its the end of the first act! He introduced the city, story-wise he doesn't need to do anything else either.
A bad person doesn't make a bad story. Stories don't need moral protagonists to be compelling. For this story, Arthur is exactly where he needs to be to make it work. At least, imo
@@seasnaill2589 nah, it definitely adds. It brings light to that arc and this is literally an analysis video. Him not including that section would be a huge oversight if he intends to also do the Ollie and Sally parts
Frankly, if they do some form of We Happy 2, I feel like it should follow Arthur trying to recover Percy, through Germany, where the population is also under heavy joy because it would make Nazism seem even better, with the moral being that the key to actual happiness is overcoming strife and being with relatives. Something like that, and throughout the story, you’re given side quests, and the more you complete the better ending you get, on a scale. Because the more selfless acts Arthur commits, the more of a good person he becomes, the more he regrets and seeks forgiveness from his brother, the more his brother forgives him. Redemption through trial by fire.
44:31
What I love most about this sequence is that Constable Peters is obviously not falling for Arthur's bs. He fully knows Arthur is not Percy, he knows he's lying his way off the train so he doesn't need to go to Germany. But at the same time, he still doesn't want to send Arthur on the train. His sense of morality blocks him from doing so. Not a single extra child on that death train than what is needed. So he let's Arthur go, not because he was convinced, but because the quota was already filled in with Percy being on board. Arthur led his brother to the station like a lamb to the slaughter. He didn't even need to lie his way off, that's just a formality at that point. A brat who only looked out for himself, wearing a wool coat of innocence to hide his selfishness. That's who Arthur Hastings is. The whole story was for him to accept he was a piece of shit and move on with his life. Not to make amends but grow as a person. The growth stunted by years of joy consumption, trying to escape from the truth.
You worded this perfectly! I heavily doubted that he actually believed Arthur, especially since he switches up his speaking patterns a ton, but it was really his morality that prevented him from sending Arthur
Woah wait the kids died??
@@donovian2538 The train is basically an insurance policy so the residents of Wellington Wells don't try anything funny. Between the kids and the papier-mache tanks, the populace are practically powerless against their occupiers. We don't know the fates of the children but they're either in Germany, dead, or escaped somehow. No in-between (most likely dead though)
@@donovian2538 Percy sure as hell did. I can't imagine he survived
@@donovian2538 Its heavily implied that the trains are an analog for the trains the Germans used to transport Jewish people, so yeah, there more than likely dead or in a camp too be killed.
The point of Arthur’s dialogue changes in Act 2 is to show how he mentally erased the things that are unpleasant and inconvenient to remember. It’s exactly like the way he forgot about what he did to his brother, even after he became a “downer.” Arthur’s coping mechanism is denial, and it makes him an unreliable narrator.
This video creator's just kinda an idiot lol. 🤷
yeah I've always thought that what Arthur said in Sally's run was what he really said and heard, and everything he said to Sally in his run is what he wanted to remember.
I also think Arthur saying he's been living in the garden isn't a retcon as much as well…Arthur lying for sympathy cause he's in the garden district
If only it got treated like bioshock. Linear world, framed by exelent writing, about desperate people, trying to deal with a society falling apart around them. And all the sides and attitudes that can bring.
It deserved that better structure. Truly.
I don't know how well joy wold have worked around a linear world you know always needing to be high to pass security checks sounds like a pain in a linear world
@@tizianm4893 It could have been a cost-benefit thing with specific booths and enemies who would become more suspicious if you were around them and clearly not effected. Compared to if you were effected, but you couldn't stealth and would perhaps get massive de-buffs to do fine maneuvering tasks like lock picking or the like.
Or as suggested, maybe you could fake taking the drug, if you take a pill in front of the cops, and you'd have a few seconds to walk away, and spit it out before it would start to effect you.
Like a social stealth system basically, but with negatives to other approaches, like combat or "regular" stealth, for a limited time. Perhaps more, depending.
@@jalioswilinghart nah
It’s clear that you know nothing about modern video games
@@danceyrselfkleen For wanting a games core focus to be different?
With Sally's ending, i was half expecting the baby to be a rat the whole time
Honestly, same.
I'm wondering if that's some kind of true ending that was cut, because it's just too dark.
She wasn't on joy, there would have to be some other random reason to why'd she'd hallucinate something like that.
That would've been an amazing twist :D
The game is based around "3 terrible characters with bad histories" so imagine if Sally did give birth but actually killed Gwen to keep her quiet but then again I'm quite happy with her ending and also that's a bit fucked up
nah, him completely omitting sally telling him shes had a baby from his perception is phenomenal characterization. youre describing a feature as if its a bug
It really emphasize how much of a self centered dickwad he his.
I think if they just nodded at him brushing that detail off a slightly bit more it would have worked great.
He did say "I wonder what lies I'll tell myself about this."
@@rroman1988 oh good catch
Yeah that's how I saw it
Instead of remaking old popular games, we should be remaking games like this that would’ve been phenomenal works if certain changes had been made to them. We Happy Few would be seen as an amazing game if the gameplay was linear, the combat was refined, and the story matched up properly.
This game was a victim of the open-world craze of the late 2010s. Yet another game that was open world despite having no reason to be.
I mean yeah... its needless for a game so focused on story
Sadly, games like this only get smaller fanbases that wouldn't make remakes like that profitable. But yeah, another game that I think comes to mind is Final Fantasy XIII. It would be great if games with lackluster gameplay could have a time for redemption like that.
A more likely opportunity for We Happy Few is an adaptation. The main attraction of this game and what brings most to it now is the amazing writing. A series or movie would be wonders
I don't want a remake because they will probably make it worse.
At least it wasn’t like a collectathon, once you finish you finish, no need to collect 500 bits of scrap
The setting for We Happy Few actually isn't a "Nazis won WWII" world. The Nazis were overthrown and Germany was ruled by Rommel. Britain surrendered to the Germans, but the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. did not, leading to both American and Soviet soldiers fighting alongside each other on the Eastern Front and leading to a longer war which did defeat Germany, but Britain never recovered when they retreated from Britain
Wasn't Rommel a Nazi too?
Ok this makes a lot more sense cuz I was like “why tf would you send your kids to Germany when the Nazis won”
@@muzicalassassin2901 Children are much easier to indoctrinate, the rest of the old people would be irrelevant to the Nazi germany
@@muzicalassassin2901Rommel was still bad
@@Mrtroop-bd3xuyeah but he was also defeated by the russians and americans
1:16:00
Slight correction, Sally didn't just give Ollie some amalgamation of Joy pills willy nilly so he could completely forget. It was a special batch of Joy. Oblivion. It doesn't just makes your memory fuzzy around the edges. It scrambles your brain entirely. The reason it was never mass produced and distributed en masse is because once a person takes oblivion, you're not really happy, just all over the place, schizophrenic, random, sensitive in all the wrong ways. Because the point of Oblivion isn't to feel happy, it's to forget.
The same pill is even offered to Arthur in the epilogue by Head Constable Peters at the bridge. If he does take the pill, he goes back to the garden district, obliviously having a good time on the playground equipment. Undoing ALL the character development he had achieved throughout the course of the game. He was happy before, wasn't he? What's stopping him from going back?
Interestingly, Arthur is the only one given this choice
It’s interesting to analyze this story, especially cause I realized Arthur’s thoughts about sally are similar to a kids. He doesn’t think of the negative experience for her, he cares that he was hurt by it. In a way. This is similar to how some less developed teenagers may think of this situation.
Personally I think it may imply that joy stopped him from maturing past this mindset, refusing him the opportunity to grow and realize how much it hurt her too. He simply doesn’t. Because joy didn’t truly let him become an adult.
is that a homestuck pfp or am i too far gone
@@djnotokay7677 nah your not too far gone. probably were both too far gone. (yes, yes it is)
Despite the actual game being kind-of a mess, I still love and genuinely appreciate that they got an actual band to do insert songs for this. It's such a cool touch that adds a lot more personality to the experience, more than normal soundtrack osts at least.
Yes, I understand. I still listen to those songs, haha.
I love how Jack's last tape blindsides you, hitting like a truck, the VAs did an amazing work to make the scene punch so much harder.
This story is an example of how video games aren't always the be-all-end-all medium. This would've benefited a lot from being a web series or a Graphic Novel.
Web series suck ass, this totally could've been done well as a game if it was just done well.
@@daifuku75 bad take, read Lackadaisy or Homestuck and come back to me afterwards and say that
Or maybe some kind of book, maybe. A novel, perhaps. That would be brave and new.
I agree to a point, but I think if they had just made it a linear game like Bioshock, it would have went over really well. People were comparing the vibes to Bioshock already and I remember a linear game is what I thought it was and what made me excited to play it.
@@gigiluv5527 I was one of those people. Right away it looked like "Cold War BioShock," ready to tackle era relevant politics complete with influences from Brave New World and Cold War Spy-Fi like The Prisoner, The President's Analyst, 007 and The Cape Town Affair.
Then... We got what we got. The gameplay choices and map really hindered WHF's potential.
Same goes for Deathloop, it had great gameplay with memorable characters, but lacked WHF's story weight and had a bizarre/distracting multi element. I'm hungry for a 1960s retro-future title without the half hearted game elements.
I'm absolutely obsessed with the "They Came From Below" DLC. The relationship between Roger and James is so realistically bickery yet strangely endearing and I adore it.
All 3 of the DLCs are spectacular. I rly didn't like how hugely We All Fall Down undermines Ollie's story, but it has an amazing atmosphere. I like They Came From Below as a more silly and fantastical story w some rly fun leads but Lightbearer is my fav for the music, Nick being my fav character to play as (besides Arthur) and the gameplay being actually fun???? Crazy
@@yeethittter1285
Each character had their own part to play in saving Wellington Wells, whether the narration of said character is accurate or not. Whilst some may have done more than others, each "means to an end" brought about positive change that resulted in a surviving civilization.
@@KingSolidTails What I mean is that Oli's story about convincing the people of Wellington Wells to get off of joy was a really satisfying ending for the game and for his character arc. but if Victoria gets rid of all the joy anyway then Oli's choice doesn't matter at all because they've stopped anyway. Not from their own descision after hearing Jack's broadcast, but because they're literally forced to
Also, if I was a gay man in the 1950s and I had the choice to live in a dimension full of emotionally intelligent robots with my boyfriend? Easy choice. Beep boop.
I mean, I’m a gay man _now_ and I would still maybe prefer the robots.
@@mattuwu9978 yeah I feel like the robots will always be the better choice
I'm surprised that in Sally's story they didn't go more into her cheating on Arthur since it's so important to why he's bitter towards her. Considering she was a teen who'd lost her entire family and Arthur's dad was an adult taking care of her and in a position of authority over her, I feel like it would've been more impactful to actually show her side of the situation instead of just saying in letters that she felt like she had no other choice.
There also could've been interesting parallels between Arthur's dad and General Byng. Both were much older men in positions of power over her who she slept with out of survival purposes and were using her for their own pleasure.
i definitely agree, i actually just left a super long comment about sallys lack of agency in the story lol
@@Zabe_B i didn't see your comment. When you say lack of agency are you also considering that she was living under drugged totalitarian rule? In her position she was striving to make ends meet for her baby and for herself, plenty of pressured women have been in that position before.
Definitely agree as there is a lot of agrument in the fandom itself as to whether Sally was fully... Forced.. into the relationship with Arthur's Father. There are TONS OF FANS who hate her and it's mainly because of how poor her story is compiled. So many people hate the baby mechanic, I found it super easy to work around. People call Sally a slut, I think she's a victim.. it's honestly sad but if they would have put more love into writing her like Arthur.. or even Ollie..
She's kinda the filler between the real stories
@@DespiteEverything42 The baby mechanic was honestly super fun. I liked the mix of being a baddie on the streets and coming home to check on my baby. idk it might just be me.
@@viewer6152that’s the problem when you make a story with realistic elements that are weirdly blurred. Even when done well there will always be people like the villain willing to defend the villain, since the story is portraying a person who can exist irl… it’s disgusting how many ppl I’ve seen willing to breeze past the fact she was 16 or just basic pedo garbage in other horror games. Bonkers. They don’t realize they’re the type of abusers these games are talking about.
As soon as we swap to Sally, this video went off the rails...
it's the Unreliable Narrator. Sally in Arthur's chapters is sweet, kind, innocent - he sodding says so in fact - so he mostly edits in his still likely drug addled mind to make her sound more like that. More sweet, more innocent. She smiles, and gives him affectionate looks, etc. He's also a selfish git so he edits, misremembers, or even miisperceives what HE says in these scenarios. He even sounds distracted and delirious, the way he runs into her sentence to mention Percy and rambles and changes topic so often. Probably because he's still coming down.
Also he 'lives in teh Garden district' because he's a Downer.
They're subtle changes, meant to illustrate what Joy and drug addiction has done to people. Sally and Arthur aren't magically immune to the same mental damages everyone else has suffered.
THANK YOU this is how I felt too. I genuinely am having a good time with this video but i've been hit by this part and I was. Like. Surprised.
Because this is about Perspectives and how everyone remembers the situation. They could have, of course, tightened some scenes up to make that a little more obvious (such as her asking him about the codliver oil in the garden district as opposed to them being in their home), but these are all about people who are bad in some aspects of their lives but justify their actions to a degree. They see their actions differently than others, so of course they're going to remember these scenes differently or see them in a different light.
I think it just didn't quite vibe for them, which is fine.@@DrSharkade
This is how I took the story, Unreliable Narrator. Which is rarely done in video games.
Actually, I think the differences in the confrontation between Arthur and Sally in their sections of the game is brilliant storytelling, and I can't help but feel it was unintentional. They both have been on a drug for a decade now that messes with perceptions and memories. Arthur also has a twisted perception anyway to preserve his own ego. So who's to say what the objective truth of the matter was, since we only have their subjective perceptions of the event? Did Sally actually mention her baby or did Arthur block that out so he doesn't have to feel even more like a shitheel for abandoning her at the slightest inconvenience? We know hurtful words were exchanged and ultimately a trade was made, but the whole thing is muddled by having two unreliable narrators being involved, and honestly that's fucking brilliant.
you’re a genius. 😮
yeah i agree honestly, only part of the video i thought was bad tbh since it adds context with sally as the sane one to make arthur even worse
I came to comment something similar but you articulated it much better than I ever could have. Thank you for voicing my thoughts.
Thank you, I just commented this myself. This is a game where you're playing as people with mental health issues who've been burying their feelings with denial and/or drugs. Of course there's gonna be unreliable narration.
That's exactly what I thought as well. Also, how do we know Sally really mentioned her baby? Maybe she thought she did but her mistrust made her not let ir out
the irony that the game wasnt originally intended to have a story, yet by far its best part was the story, and ended up being one of the best stories in all of gaming
it really wasn't good.
It was okay. Calling it one of the best is a huuuge stretch, unless you don’t read or don’t play a lot of story-heavy games.
"in all of gaming"? You must not play a lot of story heavy games.
@@Xeno_SolarusEven Non-story games give a better story lol
Honestly, yeah. I say the stories up there in best in terms of pure realism (barring the futuristic elements), with believable characters that all have their equally terrible but good traits, a very strong moral and lesson, and a good ending. The DLCS may have been very construed (except for We All Fall Down), but I still say that put it all together, We Happy Fews story is very high up on the list, and is only beat down by these damn game mechanics, and some of the plot incontinence it suffers
Honestly the cutscene starting out with the screams of people when you threw that cocktail is a perfect example of what the game is going for: ignoring abything unpleasant
The thing about the different cutscenes is that I doubt any of them are really representing what happened. I think its true that Arthur's make the most sense but did you notice how inconsistent the other's recollection is?
Sally sees Arthur as being short tempered and unreasonably volatile. Sally even swears less. "Yee of little fucking faith" "Ye of little faith" Maybe he is unreasonable but she sees herself as being completely and utterly wronged by him.
Ollie sees Arthur sneering a lot and holding the fake tank newspaper at a distance like it disgusts him, probably thinking he's a prissy little civilian. In Ollie's cutscene Arthur moves in a way that makes him look particularly scrawny.
imo arthurs could also make the most sense because he makes it make sense. he can't remember himself as acting *too* unreasonably because then he would have to face how selfish he really is. he does this eventually but at the point where he's talking to sally, he hasn't started to face it at all.
maybe sally is also unreliable, but i wouldn't say that her scenes don't make sense, at least the examples that were pointed out in the video. arthur doesn't read to me like he's sincerely offering to help, for instance. imo, he's asking because he believes it will make him look like a decent person.
I think he's actually hoping she doesn't want something out of the deal so he can keep telling himself she cares about and loves him. in fact he all but says as much after she asks for the cod liver oil. even in the letter he writes he's self absorbed, seemingly making it about whether sally truly loved him or not. he's a thirty year old man still hung up on a high school girlfriend who (in his eyes) spurned him. that's just not stable behavior.
Sally and Ollie are the only ones who have been completely sober though, Arthur is even more deluded than Oliver since he never admits to any sort of fault and blames Sally for being abused by his Dad. Starkey on the other hand is fully aware that Margaret isn't real and is still lucid despite his psychosis.
The differences in the cutscenes are a nod to Rashomon. Everyone has their own interpretation of what happened, and their suspicions about other people's motivations can creep into their memories and color the interactions. Nobody's lying, but nobody actually grasps the full "truth" either.
I still just cannot fathom that this man has spent nearly half of his whole life angry at his ex for being a victim of what would count in most places as statutory you-can-fill-in-the-blank.
Peak zoomer mindset
It's an alternate reality for the 1960s/1970s where most people, including Arthur before the game starts, are so drugged out they don't realise when they are starving to death, and the ones that aren't are in a constant fight for survival. Education around these points was generally much worse around those topics back then, even in the real world, the alternate reality stuff makes it even less likely that people would have access to any kind of information on consent. The fact that they are either so drugged out they barely remember stuff or fighting for survival makes them really unlikely to actually deal with their emotions, or process their trauma in any kind of useful and healthy way. He wasn't angry at her for half his life, he was really angry at her immediately after the fact, because he was a selfish, already traumatised teenager with little awareness of these things, and then probably half forgot, except maybe in small bursts, until he finally sees her again once off the drugs. He had zero opportunities to grow as a person, and probably no notion of consent (from a modern perspective) since it happened. It would have taken a much, much better person to even begin to understand what she went through in these conditions.
The entire society had no opportunity to progress, you can't have protests, tracts, essays in that kind of world, the whole setup almost guarantees that no positive change will happen. Things just stay the same until the whole system collapses.
@@filiaautand that's certainly understandable within the narrative. I'm blown away, or just perturbed by the real world in the comments defenders of Arthur like Sally is somehow worse for having a grown man take advantage of her.
@@filiaaut This is the biggest problem I have with stories set around the 1950s that features content like this, it's not clearly handled like "this is how it was back in the time and it was wrong", more just that it was an afterthought which still paints victims in a bad light
@@johng8837 Peak victim blaming mindset
ollie and margaret's voice acting in their climax scene is so, _so_ good, especially ollies- i mean he sounds EXACTLY like someone whod realized what he had done, its perfect
This game is such a tragedy. It isn’t a bad thing to be a short linear story driven game. We Happy Few got scope creeped so hard into being a mess instead of the tight focused little story it could have been.
Yeah, I was never able to finish the game, gave up halfway through Sally's storyline and completely missed Ollie's story (which I think looks like the best)
They really should not have made it open world and with the survival crafting elements. The game would have been incredible if they tightened it down and made it more like hopping from level to level.
@@KaiWolf18my brother did the same thing, i was just watching but Sally's guilt mechanic killed me. So many clunky mechanics all over tbh. The random ass maps for each chapter were whack too
@@KaiWolf18Dude the baby aspect of Sally's story absolutely turned me off, it was SO annoying
@@sketchysketches381 See, I was okay with the guilt mechanic. Was a little annoying but I figured the main quests would always keep sending me back near her home so it wouldn't be too inconvenient to just pop in and feed the baby.
What got me was just the boring running around outside of the main areas. I had spent the last 20 hours as Arthur trying to 100% the game by doing every sidequest and just got so sick of the game by that point.
When I finished his story to only realize I had a whole 'nother one to do I was just burnt out. Couldn't take all the endless running around back and forth. I thought Sally's was the end, didn't even know Ollie had a story.
I feel like if they had the resources (and willpower) for it, they could go back and add some polish to the mechanics and gameplay to make it not as arduous.
I’d love for another “No Man’s Sky” story of ultimate redemption, because the story and way it was presented (at least here) genuinely is told beautifully!
11:22 if memory serves, there was another major difference. It wasn’t Nazi Germany but Imperial Germany that won. I don’t remember if they addressed HOW, but Kaiser Wilhelm II wasn’t removed after WWI and his son reigned after him. I think there was also a war with the Soviet Union that may or may not still be going on as of the time of the game.
I was going to mention, recruiting conquered peoples as a homogenization tactic is much more in line with something Imperial Germany would do, in order to instill a unified Germanic identity.
@@eMorphizedYea, and also explains why they left the place alone, unlike the Nazis would do
I think I disagree about your take on Arthur’s ending. I read it as being about how sometimes you are simply too late to make up for your wrongs, and you just have to move on and do your best to be better. He doesn’t change until at the end when he stopped chasing what was never going to be (reuniting with the brother he betrayed) and decided to keep going even though he can’t undo what he did.
“Life keeps going, *that* is the mercy.”
yes - arthur is living in the past the whole game, from his issues with his brother to his issues with sally. the entire game is themed around facing painful memories and moving on from them to do better.
Agreed. That's Arthur's entire arc throughout the story. For him to realize and accept what a piece of shit he is and grow as a person. A growth that was stunted by years of joy abuse
It's kinda funny how high the dialogue changes went over your head. They're so glaringly different and the baby line especially is a notable absence in act one, it seems kind of a given that the issue is that both characters are experiencing those scenes differently, Arthur brushes off the baby because he just doesn't hear her say that line, or immediately forgets it. Makes sense if he's only recently stopped taking Joy and is still recovering from the effects and thus it's still affecting his perception. But I guess sometimes even obvious stuff gets past us sometimes.
The constable at the end is a nice explanation for Arthur’s arc throughout the game. He doesn’t deserve forgiveness. But, with his new freedom, he has the choice of what he wants to do, stay the shitty person he is or grow up as a person and try to gain forgiveness in the future. As the constable says: Life goes on, that is the mercy
i feel really bad for Sally. She was groomed and was actually trying to help. Atleast she escaped and got a chance of happinnes than arthur.
Wanna know something very sad about Arthur end? His brother is most definitely dead and he is probably searching for nothing
@@henrycooper3431 arthur knows that hes just using percy as his reason to escape showing how truly selfish he is
the amount of people blaming her in the replies to comments is gross
53:10 I think the intention is that they are both misremembering the conversation in a specific way that pushes more to what they wanted to happen in that interaction. Sally’s version makes Arthur seem less in the right and Vice versa.
Thank you, I was waiting for someone to say this, I think it’s brilliant
For how thourough this analysis I didn't expect him to miss that. Of course both of these people (especially Arthur and his Joy-withdrawn brain) remember (or choose to remember) their version of the story that makes them look like the righteous one. (Although tbd it would be more evident if the space continuity was kept, i.e. they at least agreed on who reached out to who and where). It also explains why Sally seems so much better than the rest; she had gone through real trauma but we only learn of her from her own act, only through the lens of said trauma, and apparently long after the events that make all the men in her life decide she's a horrible person. She is definitely at least partially been exploited a lot but we can never be sure we have the full side of the story.
People sometimes complain about railroading in videogames, but I think that such a big story would've benefited from some rails. This is the first time I've experienced the story and it's phenomenal!
A-FUCKING-MEN I always thought this. I honestly feel so validated.
The only reason any of them can be considered the 'good guys' is because they are the only ones in the town willing to even try facing down their pasts.
The message of the game, as far as I see it, is that in life there is no such thing as good and bad. On a philosophical level, it was only ever tyranny vs. freedom. On a character level, there was only ever tough choices to make. The characters irrational unraveling of those choices is where the game picks up.
Ultimately I feel like you nailed it with your conclusion, and that is it is more admirable to face your consequences than it is to live a lie.
What a goosebump raising story this was
Didn't like half the town chose to not forget their pasts? The downers?
Some of them tried to be better, but not everyone, and most people can actually fight the system, but they didn't accept it for what it is, they didn't chose to forget and act like the past never happened.
@@3bodYking99 off of memory, very few chose to fight. Most people, presumably, had no idea they were being drugged to make them oblivious to the truth.
Off memory, only few people suspected something was wrong. Of those few, only some chose to come to terms with reality in their own way.
I don't believe there was ever a true epiphany of the masses that totally understood what was taking place. Whenever someone was withdrawaling, regardless of how tragic it was around them, all they were concerned about was the next dose.
Speaking about this more in depth made me realize how scary some of these parallels are to real life
@@justinkyle4052 i am not talking about an uprising or any real fight.
I am talking about the whole purpose of the garden, and most of it's occupants.
The refused joy because they didn't want to forget or be fake happy, and they were banished to the garden.
@@3bodYking99 oh, that's right! The outcast of their society... I forgot they were called the downers. I thought you meant that in general because anyone who was withdrawaling always got referred to as a downer.
I do remember at times feeling like the downers should of been on drugs. Not because I wanted them to be like everyone else in town but because they were a bit delusional and even borderline schizophrenic and extremely volatile.
Anyways, great point. I'm not really sure what came of that story arch. Like if there was ever any reconciliation and cooperation.
I remember the ending of the last dlc where the main character takes down the entire drug supply and everyone hates her for it. Not to get off topic but that last dlc is real trippy because it's hard to tell if she wasn't hallucinating the whole thing and it was just all in her head. There is a theory out there that paints this picture, using previous dlc to line up it's timeline.
If that's the case, that if in fact the last dlc was nothing more than her coming off of drugs and hallucinating the whole time, then I'd imagine that fundamentally nothing has changed for anyone.
Oh my god the molotov'd enemy sounds, all the screaming outside during Ollie and Victoria's talk made it feel downright Shakespearean lmao
It does kinda explain how nobody heard her screams for help
The change in dialogue are meant to show the effects of the joy and how their withdrawal made everyone’s memory of the situation all fuzzy, at least that’s what I’ve heard
This game can be summed up in two sentences. You tear up by the story. You tear up by the gameplay
Yeah I think that what is interesting about Arthur's character is that he is the one most affected by Joy's normal effects. Sally has seemingly maintained her mind and sanity and Ollie got that big dose that broke his brain entirely. But Arthur is someone who has been taking the stuff regularly for well over a decade and seemingly is only just now coming off of it, and as such he reveals exactly what Joy has been doing to people, which becomes more clear in Act 2 when you see things outside of his perspective.
Like for instance I think that the reason why he's such a selfish prick is because he's basically stopped evolving mentally ever since he was a teenager. In the real world it's somewhat understandable that someone his age at the time might not have put together what *really* happened between Sally and his dad, so he would throw a fit and blame her when it's clearly not her fault. But over time as he gets older and more mature he would almost certainly at some point put 2 and 2 together and let go of his resentment towards her. Instead though he's been taking a Joy since then, which means that he's been in a brainfog his entire life and never grown mentally past that point. He's never been able to reflect on his past because Joy causes him to always warp events to paint himself in the best possible light as that would be the least sad thing to consider. So He just keeps assuming it was Sally's fault for "cheating" on him. He forgets he was lying to get his brother taken away, etc etc.
And of course even after he stops taking the pills he's still under its effects. Just cause you quit taking drugs cold turkey doesn't mean it magically stops affecting you, especially when you've been in a brain fog for over a decade. So that explains the inconsistencies with the cutscenes. He interprets the conversation flowing much more naturally towards focusing on his own trauma when in reality he just brings it up out of nowhere. He ignores the baby because it's easier for him to justify leaving without her.
I mean this is reinforced with Ollie too, seeing as his Joy overdose causes him to completely reverse his trauma so that the bad thing happened *to* him instead of *by* him. And hell even the gamemode where you play as a cop as well since it's revealed that the cops think they're just "peacefully" subduing people and everything will go back to normal so that they can ignore the horrors they're inflicting on others.
The lesson is that the concept of ignoring your Trauma through Joy is an inherently selfish concept. Instead of acknowledging your trauma you're just pushing past it and hoping it goes away. Why think about bad things when you can think about good things instead? After all Surely if anything bad is happening, someone else will take care of it. But that's the problem, when *Everyone* is forced into that mindset by Joy, and when everyone is trying to offload their trauma and negative feelings onto others, nobody is left to actually address those problems and traumas and they just keep piling up, until eventually everyone realizes that the food is running out because nobody can be bothered to acknowledge that someone has to actually deal with the city's problems.
So yeah I think it makes sense that Arthur, the stand in for what the everyman in this city is like, would also be the most selfish of the protagonists. The irony of course is that he was so selfish that he left the city, right as things were about to change thanks to Ollie's Selflessness, and if he had stuck around he might have been able to help make a difference. As opposed to how despite leaving, he acknowledges that there's nothing he can actually do for his brother at this point.
This was a great comment, I completely agree
This was what was missed big time in the video’s analysis and I’m glad I’m seeing a lot of comments mentioning this. From what I saw of Act II, it really builds upon what was set up about Arthur in Act I (a lot of very interesting consequences you mentioned in your comment) and shows through Sally that not much has changed in this brave new world’s corrupt backend regarding gender dynamics.
Characterwise, it fleshes Sally’s daily concerns out as being SO completely detached from the normal folks on Joy that it’s hard for her to follow Arthur’s conversation at all. Maybe Arthur was less awkward in the true conversation, but Sally was thrown off so much by how he came in swinging w/ a bunch of heavy shit she has no context for AND this phase from her childhood that he has such a completely different perspective on - holy shit! The implications are wild! Act II good
I ain’t reading allat
@@Severity.
I read allat.
_We are not the same._
@@Severity. shouldn't you be in class with the other third graders
It kind of shocks me that there isn't more challenge in this comment section to the narrative that Sally cheated. The anger towards her is just wild. Sally didn't cheat, Sally was a child, she was a child the same age as this man's son, being raised as his adoptive daughter. I've seen people in the comments arguing about whether it was consentual, a child cannot give consent, especially not to an adult, and on top of that, an adult that has been grooming them. Arthur's father is a gro0mer, a p€dophile, and a child r@pist. Sally is a victim who is throughout the story being blamed for being taken advantage of, the story does very little to contest this perspective, but it blows my mind a little that folks are so willing to accept this narrative without challenging it.
Really? I’ve mostly seen defenses for her. Honestly, most people seem to think she was either a helpless child or an adolescent that would otherwise have been capable of better decisions, but was groomed into the wrong ones. I fall in the latter camp. She wasn’t a child, adolescents aren’t children. We’re old enough to start making more matured decisions than children are capable of, but we’re not as matured and a lot less experienced than adults, especially adults as old as Arthur’s dad. I think that’s the sticking point for a lot of people, because she could have made a different choice, but given her circumstances, it’s far more realistic that what ended up happening did. Don’t get me wrong, I agree she was groomed and therefore not in the wrong, but it’s misleading to say she was a child.
Seriously this comment section is so disgusting. So many people saying "it was her choice" "she wasn't a child" "both are wrong, but she wasn't forced" "she chose to cheat." I guess there are just so many misogynists who think "woman not honest = it's all her fault". The justifications are crazy!
Don't forget that Sally, a sexual assault survivor, is forced within the game to hold and feed her baby to improve her stats. In this dystopia women are still only mothers and housewives and even a fucking protagonist can't be something beyond that. They celebrated her trauma and made her use it without adressing the disgusting rape that happened.
@@DannyDevitoOffical-TrustMeBro Minors cannot consent to adults, ever. If I notice a minor attempting a flirt I'll shut it down in this very second and tell them to fuck off. It's our adult responsibility to put kids and teenagers into place for their sake.
It was her choice 😂 she chose to cheat 😭
I feel like the changes in the conversations with Sally and Arthur between acts 1 and 2 is because we’re looking through a different perspective. Sally remembers them in a much worse light
This is one of these games that REALLY should have been Linear, people even called it a "Bioshock-like" before the release
Or like a telltales game ✌️
It also really shouldn’t have been early access if the story had a lot of hype people would’ve bought it for that. But making it EA just turned ppl off when they saw the gameplay was different from what they want it stops a consumer from returning
Britain-shock
He convinced himself he didnt betray his brother for years and ypu are CONVINCED he wouldnt lie to himself about knowing about the baby? Great video besides your take on the different perspectives
love this video but this comment made me giggle 😭😭
WAIT JUST A MOMENT, ok so the city is called Hamlyn, right? Well, that's the name of the city in the story of the pied piper, isn't it? And what did the Germans do? THEY TOOK THE KIDS AWAY.
1:34:02 There's even a statue of the piper luring the rats away.
Didn't that one guy think the baby was a hallucination and actually just a rat?
@@fusseld100Cat
I feel like the procedurally generated maps could have been a really cool addition as a challenge. Like if you take too much joy the world literally changes to replicate the memory loss the player experiences
Or the number of items in your inventory chamges or something
Would have been frustrating to play through but it would add a consequence for taking joy
Despite the controversy and glitches, I ADORE THIS GAME. It’s easily in my top five, because of the writing, voice acting, art design and music.
Really glad I'm not alone on this. I'm right there with you! I adore this game and loved the story of it all. I never really encountered any problems gameplay wise and the only times I felt it got slow or stuck was usually bc of my own stupidity lol. I especially like how with each story you play, you watch the world crumble around you as the Joy completely takes over everything.
you should play pathologic
So many people complain about this game, and I do understand their frustrations and agree that it definitely has flaws, but man, I love this game. I had so much fun playing and I fell in love with the story. So much to explore, discover, and experience.
same here
I’m so happy you still enjoy the game.
I never played it but I empathized with the playerbase.
I love the idea of the dialog changes, though I admit most could have been done better. I actually really like when they first meet, and he THINKS she asked about him when she was talking about herself. He is shellfish enough that it makes perfect sense he would assume she would ask more about him even if she said something else.
Homies out here really flexing their mussels huh.
Bro… the fact about The Make Believes genuinely made my jaw drop. I’ve always wanted to play this game but never had the console to do so, so that was.. wow, I’m genuinely so shocked and have been listening to them since 2018! (The year it was made) I’m so baffled wow
1:25:22
Yeah I think a big thing with all of the characters if how they each focus on a different person/group of people. Arthur’s main goal is himself, he wants to escape, no matter the cost. Sally’s goal is her daughter, she wants to escape to give her daughter a life she couldn’t have had. And Ollie’s goal is the town itself, to save everybody from drugging themselves to death pretty much. Sure Ollie was a bad person, but overall what he ended up doing in his story was a very noble thing. The same can’t exactly be said about Arthur.
We also have to consider that what Arthur did to his brother was intentional, while what Ollie did to Jacks daughter wasn’t entirely intentional. Arthur knew what would’ve happened if his brother arrived in Germany, but Ollie didn’t know that Jacks daughter would’ve just been shot. It doesn’t make what he did any better, but it’s still something to consider
I have to say, having all of the TV episodes be reruns is... Actually pretty smart. There's a reason for the repetitiveness, and they don't have to make an INSANE amount of them for the game.
I'm completely on Sally's side considering she was a minor at the time when they "fornicated", Arthur's just blaming the victim instead of his father.
In the uk and the majority of the world 16 is age of consent... so not a minor, and this is set in the UK where its 16
@@onri_that doesn’t make her not a minor
@@simstophat1078 "A minor usually refers to a person under the age of 18, but can also refer to any person under the 'legal age' for certain activities." Please refer to the definition from a law firm.
I can lose a finger and still have fingers, Just like a I can be of age of majority for some things and be a minor for others.
@@onri_ Are you defending an adult having sex with a 16 year old??? Let alone the partner of their own child??
I actually didn't catch that, another thing to add to the reasons to hate Arthur jar!
I think the dialogue changes are based on the actual character we’re playing. Like Arthur purposefully ignored the baby because of his selfishness and blamed her more on his side. That’s what I picked up at least
A small theory I got about dialogue changes between acts. I believe its different because each characters perspective is so skewed in their own head that the dialogue changes just to better fit their own narrative in their head. It make's a lot of sense especially for Arthur, being so selfish and entitled to the point of completely blanking out things that would make him look worse or changing the conversation to make it feel like someone asked him.
I am very tired as of writing this, so I hope I could properly express my thoughts on it
This comment is exactly what I was thinking. Everyone keeps talking about minute “continuity errors” as if that completely takes away from the “unreliable narrator” trope in the game entirely driven on twisting the truth and pretending things are what they aren’t.
exactly my thoughts!! you worded it very well
Not to mention a potential biproduct of having only *just recently* stopping the consumption of Joy when his adventure began. It's sure to have fucked with Arthur's more "negative" memory and general perception, just as it fucks with everyone else's in Wellington Wells.
I think the conversations change between acts as joy f-s up your memory and it might just be how the different characters remember it. And Ollie is just… Ollie.
Great video! I thought it was interesting that you hated the conversation changes with arthur so much, because I rather liked them. To me it exemplified the extent to which arthur was lying to himself, even off joy he is ever the unreliable narrator. The way I see it, Arthur was so shocked by Sally's admission that she had a baby that his mind just refused to process the info at all. It just adds another tally to the things he'll regret when he remembers them. Or maybe he won't, considering he's still mad at her for being effectively a victim of statutory rape at the hands of his dad.
Bonus thoughts, Arthur is a compulsive liar. Beyond the different vignettes caused by his on/off relationship with hardcore psychedelics. And he’s absolutely willing to lie to himself and intentionally misinterpret or misremember events for his own comfort and ego.
Also, there’s no real guarantee that Sally’s a reliable narrator either. No strong reason to doubt her either, mind, but it would track with the rest of the characterisations.
Not exactly what I thought but I also had the maybe they're unreliable narrators thought. It would definitely fit in with what the story is trying to tell because the lines being different off of a mistake doesnt seem to make sense either with how well the story is done. I can't imagine it would have been hard to check what was written line for line in those scenes, and they pribably did considering some lines were the same.
What?
@@everythingpony Sally was a minor when she slept with his dad
I love how the cop in arthur’s ending comforts him like a father would
i love at 1:20:06 margaret's subtitle color turns into orange since she was never there, just in ollie's head.
I like to think the dialogue changes between acts show how everyone remembers things completely differently, it's a heavy theme through the story, most prominently with Arthur misremembering the train incident multiple times. All the characters are unreliable narrators so they remember each interaction differently, Sally remembers seeing Arthur and making conversation only for him to butt in with his own problems and storm off like a man child, she seeks him out and offers him the letter in exchange for a favor, etc. However Arthur on the other hand is quite selfish and tends to already have some issues remembering certain details of an event (as seen with Percy) so I think his selfishness makes him remember the situation as Sally asking him what got him off his joy, him having to do a whole bunch of work to seek Sally out and apologize only for her to ask for a favor to get the letter, his memory tries to make him feel like a better person than he actually is when we play as him
There is an alternate universe where We happy few is a book/movie. And I think that would be a better that way. It probably would have become a modern classic.
I actually DO like that the characters POV differs on the same conversation. Considering neither of them are particularly good people and neither of them are completely sane (on or off their Joy), they are also not reliable narrators.
Personally, if the gameplay didn’t weight it down, this game could have been up to dark souls status, it really was a amazing concept, and the story is fantastic, just wished the gameplay was better, but for a game company that was barely known, it’s pretty impressive.
It doesn't even need better gameplay, the game could remove the gameplay and focus entirely on the story, cutting off the dead weight. People can't complain about a walking simulator when it is literally advertised as such.
So is not a game anymore? Thats stupid.@@ibraheemshuaib8954
Ollie's story is still probably my favorite, and still makes me emotional with that twist
What fucks me up about Sally’s story is how she’s expected to just hold everyone else’s emotions for them. She doesn’t have the “luxury” to take joy and forget, because she has to survive. And to survive means to hold all of these awful feelings and memories for everyone else’s sake. She’s the one who soothes over the hurt of the evil men who “do bad things for the greater good” with sex and drugs. And with Arthur, she has to sit there and take it as he berates her for being sexually abused, as if he was the victim, because she is the one who had to emotionally process it for the both of them while Arthur could afford to suppress it and never grow up.
Not to be all cringe with “aS a wOMaN” but I feel like it ties into the story very well, that when bad emotions and memories are suppressed bad things happen. And in this case, it’s an example of how the thankless job of processing society’s trauma has often fallen onto women. The society in this game would fall apart without people like Sally, and all she gets in return is to be abused and berated.
Projecting a bit? Have a cup of tea and lie down, I'm worried about you.
didn't she fuck her boyfriends dad as a 16 year old? lol
@@themudpit621 You are, she isn't.
Whatever tea you're drinking certainly isn't helping you out, y'may want to try out a new brand.
Excellently put, she definitely deserved a happy ending.
@@themudpit621 We're worried about you. You're ignoring basic story elements in a easy to understand game
so i had this half-in-the-background when it got to the part with the DLC and i was like "wow that rockstar's voice acting is really good" then it went a little farther and i was like "wait that sounds familiar"
i looked it up. it's neil newbon. astarion, elijah kamski, gavin reed, heisenberg. just won best performance at the game awards. how is it that this game picked up such consistently good voice actors? i'm shook, this game has No Right
1:31:16 The "Fake joy" thing is actually technically in the game in the form of sunshine. A pill that makes you look like your on joy, even to detectors, but has none of joys effects.
Yeah!! Annoying that he just acted luke that wasn't a thing despite being important in Sally's act but I guess it lines up w him not remembering any of the gameplay lol
I was into the game when it first came out but I had no clue how deep the sally/Arthur plot went. Sally was a child, a victim. And I think Arthur’s insane for not being able to see that 14 years later
His brain has been fried pretty much the whole time. He is an immature asshole but the joy has stunted everyones emotional development
I like to think it's cuz of him being addicted to joy for so long that he never got the chance to mature, it would make a really compelling narrative to discuss the developmental delay in children due to use of Joy. Like homeboys a grown man now but still doesn't have basic empathy. I feel so bad for Sally, I really hope it was an intentional choice to make Arthur such a douche and not them dropping the ball on a really fucked up situation
to be fair, unlike in a normal situation Arthur was seeing that 14 years later but likely didn't know during those 14 years, what with the foggy memories. that being said, the game makes it relatively clear that Arthur is very much intended to be a bad person, the ending practically spells it out, Arthurs two choices were to forget or to continue knowing who he really is... the kind of person that decides to sacrifices his brother for personal gain. so yeah, I'd say Arthur being a douche is intentional given his entire chapter is him remembering the awful thing he did to his brother, with layers of self deception being peeled off as the game progresses, from "I was too old" to "I told them they had my birthday wrong" to "I lied and told them they had my birthday wrong" to "I lied using my brothers passport that they had my birthday wrong tricking my brother into taking my spot".
The joy kept him from accepting what happened
I think the comment section is insane and not putting themselves in his shoes. You dont have to agree, just understand the position the character was written as.
Your video is one of the only videos that actually covers the ENTIRE story. I dug and dug for an explanation video for a couple years for this game and YOU are the FIRST to finally do it. This game is almost a decade old and y you're the first to cover the story in full. The only video just as close ignores the second act and skips it in a huff. I don't even think they covered Ollie's act. I'm honestly so happy to finally know the full story as I've always wanted to find out more on it, but no one ever bothers going in depth of it. The three acts are so fascinating. Honestly, with how act two and act one are with the scenes differences, it feels more like they animated the wrong scenes and put them in with the cut or changed dialogue, since they're not even in the same locations for the second two which is very odd and confusing. It makes me wonder if at some point the story was different and if you had to pick Arthur or Sally to be the character you played, especially since either way Ollie's story has to come last, but Arthur and Sally only overlap here and there but Arthur's story is still going on.
I wish more was done for Sally though...She was a groomed victim and is shows. Event he way she flirts with Arthur slightly to get her way feels like a trait she had picked up from what happened as a child. For her, she already wore that mask even if it wasn't on since she suffered the most. She was abused by every man in her path and it's not till the end where she knows her daughter won't suffer that same fate where she feels to be her TRUE self. She isn't used to make medication or to satisfy a man physically, but she's a mother who loves her daughter and is strong enough to prove that she'd do anything for her when her own mother wouldn't. The first act is about a man who was selfish and let his past ruin him, but even so doesn't change and will forever linger on those faults, the second is of someone moving on and breaking a cycle, and the third is moving on from the past, but still living with it in freedom. It makes me a bit sad we couldn't have a sequel with a happier ending after the last dlc, but it's understandable. Honestly, the dystopian retro European/London colorful feel is rad ngl, wish more games used it!
I really like how the endings for each character sort of grows in scope from the previous. Arthur escapes bringing change to his life, Sally escapes bringing change to her and her babies life, and Ollie escapes possibly changing the lives of the people on the island.
I actually REALLY LIKE the fact that the scenes between Act 1 and Act 2 are so different. You wanna know why?
If you've ever watched a certain video on a certain game called *Pathologic* you'll know that depending on the character you choose, the personality of the characters changes.
With Daniil, if you're playing as him, you get a snobby guy who thinks he's better than everyone. But if you're playing as literally anyone else, Daniil suddenly becomes an EXTREMELY snobby MORON of an ASS who can never hold his tongue for more than 5 seconds and constantly interrupts people. Every character becomes a worse version of when You had been around to control them and help.
Consider BOTH of these perspectives, now consider all the lines as how *THEY* perceive themselves! Remember; Joy warps conversations, and every person has a different understanding of their own stories. I imagine the NPCs talking is what they ACTUALLY say or atleast what the character you're playing as hears, but what you hear out of yourself when you're playing as them is what they *THINK* they're saying. Sally's lines are Much kinder and understanding when it's herself, and suddenly Arthur becomes a fucking ASSHOLE on the other side. BUT when you're playing AS Arthur, Sally is portrayed as the bad guy and that Arthur is just slightly less of a selfish _prick_ than he actually is. It's SUCH A GOOD DYNAMIC on how people *_PERCEIVE THEMSELVES!_*
EDIT: And some follow-ups. I don't think you can expect a _selfish asshole_ to do more than the common courtesy of asking if there's anything he can do and then actually expect him to honor his word. He's a selfish asshole, he just said that so he didn't seem like one, but didn't actually have any intentions of doing so, which is why he doesn't ask from His perspective, because he doesn't actually mean it wink wink nudge nudge. As for Sally saying she has a baby... I don't actually know. I feel like there's a psychological reason behind that. I've felt like my words held more weight than they Actually did. Maybe she felt like she was saying something Super impactful like that, and then was just really excited to go with him as soon as possible, completely forgetting to Truly mention it to his face.
I was think about pathologic this entire video lmao
@@maintainrain same. I keep thinking about hbomberguy's video essay on pathologic while thinking about this game. Something about them feels so similiar... actually now that i think of the similiarities there are a lot, omg. the walking, boring gameplay but amazing story, several characters to play as and a lot more,,, omg. I assume the games being so similiar is a coincidence, but dang, they seem so similiar now that i think about it (coming from someone who has played neither game)
LMFAO i know this comment is from a few weeks ago but i JUST made a comment about the same thing. that video was so good, and i also thought the changes were amazing. youve explained it so well here
plus i had basically the same idea about the "help offer" lol. to me it totally came across as him being like. "you want something dont you?" more than an actual offer of help.
Honestly, Sally's story with Arthur's dad just shows him to be an even worse person. She was SIXTEEN, a child in a very vulnerable situation. His father groomed her and took advantage of a child, and Arthur still blames HER for it. It's really sad and messed up when you stop to think about it for more than a few seconds. It wasn't her fault at all, she was a victim of abuse at the hands of Arthur's father, but he chooses to put the blame on her.
Arthur is a piece of shit as a person everyone knows about it. But Sally isn't great either, the game is about horrible persons, Sally could have tell him that she didn't want to do it, that she was forced to accept but rather than that she admits that he was cheating Arthur.
Arthur is so self centered that you could say the signs were clear, but to him his girlfriend sleep with his dad on her own account. Sally didn't (far as i am aware) actually tried to tell Arthur that she was forced rather than that she actually admits it. Its complicated situation and the victim isn't helping to clear it up. How would you feel is your girlfriend/boyfriend suddenly sleeps with one of your parents and then they say "Yeah i cheated sorry" you're not gonna think "Well the situation of power in the household was in the favor of my parent, so they forced her to sleep with them" is just nuts you're gonna think that person is a Slut/Traitor/Cheater.
@@AgustinRamirez-wl4mg That's how I view the situation. From Arthur's perspective, he thinks Sally cheated on him with his dad. From Sally's perspective she was most likely coerced into sleeping with Arthurs dad (or r*ped). I just wish Sally told Arthur what really happened instead of letting him think she's a slut/cheater. Arthur could've been more understanding, but after losing his brother, Sally was all he had and I can see why catching Sally in the act would sour his feelings toward her.
@@AgustinRamirez-wl4mg do you really think Sally had a choice in the situation, a teenaged girl who lost her whole family, has no where else to go unless she wants to lose the one person she cares about. She lives under his house as people would say. Do you think that same teenager would've likely been easy to manipulate into thinking she enjoys and wants that attention (groomed) because she's in grief (because of losing her whole family).
Again. He's the adult. He agreed to take her in. He had authority over her. Seriously, out of the two you could point your criticism to why are things hyperfocused on the person who has less blame in the situation, regardless of if you think she genuinely want to have sex with Arthur's dad.
@@flutterg1035 It's annoying how some people are that focused on arguing whether or not a *child* wanted to be molested by her father figure, as if the answer would make Mr Hastings any less of a predator...
And yeah, that person is very wrong, Arthur is not justified in blaming Sally. They were both children, so when he walked in on them in bed together, he should have mainly been disgusted at his dad for sleeping with a child, like any normal person would be.
@@drifter2928everyone else seems to understand that if you're dating a partner the blame does change based on whether the action was consensual or not. It doesn't make Hastings less of a predator, it tells us whether she broke trust in a relationship...
It's tremendously ironic and sad that they wanted to make a game with no plot and all gameplay, then went on with adding a plot, and the end product would've been better if it was only plot all along. The only part which everyone praises is what wasn't intended to be there.
Well it would be one of those little kinda fun "survival games" tgat were so often in these times
I have had vague memories of (what I now know to be) contrast for years now, and I had basically given up on finding the “weird shadow game where her parents get divorced but first her mom shoots him”, but I was NOT expecting to find it while watching a video essay about a game I also vaguely remember! But also, this video is amazing, keep up the good work!
Take it from somebody who's been on antidepressants, feeling only ONE emotion ALL the time with NO variation is the worst feeling you could possibly imagine.
I couldn’t even cry . I was just empty . It SUCKED
@@oasisofgalaxies2527 yup, insanely awful experience
It's not awful. It's nothing.
@@LugiThePainDrinkernothing can be awful
@@obamagaming9456 You know what's even worse? The developers of We Happy Few once stated that Joy is mainly their commentary on anti-depressants (and/or opioids). In fact, according to the game itself, if the majority of people in a society have severe mental health problems, leaving them untreated will result in widespread addiction, and the entire society ultimately crumbling... I think. Given that Joy is supposed to be a metaphor for opiate medication, despite its effects being more along the lines of LSD crossed with amphetamines, this is definitely not the message the creators were trying to send.
The Make Believes are just incredible, I love that Compulsion spent the time to source the work from actual Canadian artists, their entire EP is just **mwah**
I know right?! When he brought them up and started to list off their songs I was like "I found these songs on my Spotify Discovery, I love these songs!" I had no idea they were for this game, goes to show how good the music is on it's own as well!
I think in Act II, the characterization of Arthur and the lies he tells himself are completely in line with his character so far. I don't think it's a line crossed because frankly he's shown to do worse throughout the story.
You really need to read A Brave New World! This game seems to have more similarities to that book than 1984, with the medication rather than the gin they drank and the “reeducation” in Well’s book
honestly, the concept is so cool, but like, it's one of the few concepts that make me want to tear up from it alone. you end up wasting away, blissfully unaware of your body's degradation, but you just keep smiling.
and i wonder if like, anybody in wellington wells died of some sort of food poisoning by now. they were eating rat guts in the opening after all
its so sad this game is held back by its gameplay. it truly has a beautiful story
There's something called "sunshine" that I believe acts as a fake joy pill.
oh my god literally how did I forget about that
Now I know what the Gorillaz meant in Clint Eastwood when he said “I got sunshine in a bag”
I think they’re eye contacts that make you look like you’re zonked out on joy, the only weakness being that the doctors can smell joy(?) and will still try and force you to take it or straight up kill you
@@anxiousreaperess4548no, they’re little sunflower looking pills
23:14 Also what are “Crash” pills?
"those are the only changes though" to the dialogue, yes. but you didnt mention that arthur talking to sally in act 1 is in sally's house and in act 2 its in the garden district
complete scene change
I think Arthur is my least favourite character but now that I think about it. Maybe Arthur was always unhappy. If you hear his voice when he was little, his tone is sad and he sounds intelligent for a 12 year old (sadly, I've seen that kind of behaviour in my little cousin who has a hard time dealing with her parents. She's so intelligent but she feels sad most of the time...). I also did the math and his mother dies when he's 12, so that's another reason. He's the one who has to take care of his brother now that his mother is dead and even if he loves Percy, he has to deal with a lot of things with just 12 years old, so when he sends Percy with the germans without thinking about the consequences (because, again, he's just a 12yo), he has another reason to feel like shit. He didn't have a good relationship with his father either. Then when he's 16, he found out his father was grooming Sally (but Arthur thinks Sally just wanted to do that).
I understand why Arthur acts the way he does now. I'm not excusing the things he did/how he acted when he grew up but like this game showed us, people are neither black or white, we're different tones of gray. Arthur isn't completely bad either.
no i totally get that. i think arthur is morally grey. i think moat are, except sally. arthur did some pretty bad things throughout the course of the game, but i feel like, and this goes for honestly every character, you cant really blame them for wanting to escape, for wanting to feel happy. of course they do messed up things, and i like that the game doesnt necessarily demonise them, it just shows how they percieve themself and their actions
that screaming unironically added to that dialogue between Ollie and the general's daughter all to damn well
😂