Red Dead Redemption would be a really good game if it didn't try so hard to be every Western ever made. It wants to be a John Ford Western, a Peckinpah Western and a Leone and Eastwood western at the same time. The fact is there are many different kinds of Westerns with its own tradition and what we see in Red Dead's plot and story is the most cliched ones imaginable, with the usual signposts of corrupt civilization cutting down raw wilderness that Ford tackled in his sleep, the Outlaw sent to hunt his former comrades like Robert Ryan in The Wild Bunch which is also the source for its borderline offensive Mexican section.
If Red Dead wanted to be art, well it could be if it settled for Howard Hawks' Red River, that's a movie about moving Cattle across a vast terrain and the parts in the game I like are the ones in Bonnie Mac Farlane's ranch and the ones at the end with John and his family. Everything else is stuff we've seen or seen parodied a million times and all of it done with more wit and panache. Rustling cattle, bucking horses, keeping wild animals off the farm and the incredible friendship between Mac Farlane and John, which is the only new and true thing in the game, are stuff that video games are made for. Ideally, this should have been a Zelda game, Majora's Mask for instance, shorter in focus, more cheerful, more domestic and less interested in trying to be Mr. Art with a Capital A.
This is Rockstar's big problem generally, they are great when they try not to be great, and when they aren't aware that they are great. Red Dead Redemption is a game that suffers from this.
Not Quite Art
Red Dead Redemption would be a really good game if it didn't try so hard to be every Western ever made. It wants to be a John Ford Western, a Peckinpah Western and a Leone and Eastwood western at the same time. The fact is there are many different kinds of Westerns with its own tradition and what we see in Red Dead's plot and story is the most cliched ones imaginable, with the usual signposts of corrupt civilization cutting down raw wilderness that Ford tackled in his sleep, the Outlaw sent to hunt his former comrades like Robert Ryan in The Wild Bunch which is also the source for its borderline offensive Mexican section.
If Red Dead wanted to be art, well it could be if it settled for Howard Hawks' Red River, that's a movie about moving Cattle across a vast terrain and the parts in the game I like are the ones in Bonnie Mac Farlane's ranch and the ones at the end with John and his family. Everything else is stuff we've seen or seen parodied a million times and all of it done with more wit and panache. Rustling cattle, bucking horses, keeping wild animals off the farm and the incredible friendship between Mac Farlane and John, which is the only new and true thing in the game, are stuff that video games are made for. Ideally, this should have been a Zelda game, Majora's Mask for instance, shorter in focus, more cheerful, more domestic and less interested in trying to be Mr. Art with a Capital A.
This is Rockstar's big problem generally, they are great when they try not to be great, and when they aren't aware that they are great. Red Dead Redemption is a game that suffers from this.