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enguardebitch · 7 years

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top 3 twdg episodes?

1. No Time Left. Although this episode was shorter than all the others, and had parts where I felt were quickly glossed over just to get to the end, it doesn’t affect my utter love for this episode. In all the video games that I played, none really broke me like No Time Left did, and all the things that you did over the course of the season came to a point when you confronted the man who took the only thing left that Lee had, Clementine.

All your relationships with the characters, all the arguments that you took a side in or even stayed on the bench, you see that they had an effect on the people around you, especially Kenny and Clementine. Even Ben, who is a determinate character in this episode, was given the chance to grow even after his potential death, and he could finally tell Kenny that even though he was suffering, so was Ben, so was everyone else, and that Ben was sorry for what he done. Behind Clementine and Lee’s relationship, the relationship between Kenny and Ben was my close second simply because of how this episode took it.

Even the villain was a well thought villain simply because he was just a man trying to survive in a world that broke him, just like Lee and Kenny and Lilly and Clementine and everyone else that we had met. He became a villain because of the actions of the main character and his group, the protagonist who in most games is saw as the hero of the story, and the episode twisted the typical role of the protagonist by having the villain rightfully telling Lee what he did wrong throughout the game. While some reasons are not as powerful if you played Lee a certain way, you most certainly felt the punch if you played Lee another way because the episode is basically telling you that this broken man can easily become anyone that you know and love, even the “hero” himself is no different to the “villain” because that’s the world they live in now.

Finally, the ending. The fact that we played as Lee, that we saw ourselves in this character and that we know that he is going to die, it does not make the actual event any easier to handle when it finally comes. When Lee is lying in that jewellery shop with Clementine begging him to get up, we find ourselves right there with her begging Lee to get up, to keep on fighting when we know that time is finally up for him. He simply has no time left. I have no doubt that most of the players, along with me, had cried when Clementine put Lee down/left him because he was no longer there. The player felt that loss just as much as Clementine herself did, and makes for a telling story and characters that you are able to get attached too.

2. Around Every Corner. Around The Corner was a pretty good penultimate episode for me, and that’s because it goes back to the fact that I made a lot in my answers. The choices you make all come together as in this episode when Lee has hit his lowest point, when he had lost Clementine. How you behaved to the characters around you and the choices you make tip the scales on who will risk their lives for you, and who will cut ties and stay behind. If you make certain choices earlier in the episode, Ben won’t even be there to help you save the little girl, and that’s because you didn’t save him. If you cut ties to people left right and center, you will find yourself quickly backed into a corner with no one there that you can rely on.

It’s as the episode says in the title, there’s danger literally around every corner, and it shows what happens to people who put themselves above the group or try to weed out the weak thinking that they cannot survive. Crawford was a dictatorship that decided that all people who were “weak”; the elderly, the children, the ill and the pregnant, they didn’t deserve the chance to survive, and looked what happened. One of the people that they saw as weak, that they wanted to force a difficult choice on to get rid of her unborn child, she turned and she lashed out, and no matter what Crawford spouted about the strong must survive while the weak will die, it doesn’t change the fact that their community fell because of the actions of a single “weak” member.

Also, this is the episode where Clementine’s development into who she is in the later seasons finally starts. She started to learn how to use a gun in the last episode, but she wasn’t ready mentally to actually pull the trigger, she had yet to learn that fear is what would get her killed and that she would have to confront that fear if she wanted to live. This episode is the episode where Clementine finally learns to pull the trigger, and the next episode concludes this by having Clementine take her first life. It’s a horrible lesson for a young child to learn, but it was a lesson that she needed to learn nonetheless.

Also, it introduces a character that, to me, felt like she was meant to be the action packed loner stereotype that you see so often in these types of games. Molly was introduced being able to trick the intelligent Lee and get the jump on him, even if this ends up with Lee managing to fight back, it says a lot about her that she was able to know that someone was watching her and then sneak around the newspaper stand while Lee was approaching her. However, this isn’t all about Molly’s character, she’s not just this loner type with nothing else attached who’s there to show how bad ass she is. Molly tried to be compassionate, and she shows multiple times that she is capable of empathizing with other survivors and do the right thing.

She tried to save her diabetic sister, even going as far as allowing herself to be sexually exploited just to get medicine, and in the end her sister was killed and she left the community trying to push the “survival of the fittest” mentality. She attacked people who were creeping up on her and she didn’t know them, but she stopped when a little girl begged her not to kill her guardian, and then she saved the little girl and one of the grown men who tried to put a gun to her head. Even when Clementine was out of danger, Molly went and gave Lee the means to escape rather than cutting her losses and excusing herself by saying she did all she could. Even towards the end, she allowed herself to be left behind in a crumbling city so that people that she barely knew could leave with a boat that they found, simply because she didn’t want to put them through the hard choice of deciding who had to stay behind. She sympathized, while other survivors who were meant to be sympathetic because they were ill, like the cancer group, betrayed Lee no matter what he was like and stole the only way out of the city while the group left to rescue Clementine.

3. Above The Law. There were a lot of episodes that I really liked just under the top two, but I would have to admit that Above The Law would have to be my third choice. The other episodes in A New Frontier were alright, especially after Season Two, but they were fast paced and often I didn’t really find myself bothered with what happened save for a few instances, such as Mariana’s death. It was really Above The Law that I thought that maybe Telltale had took their mistakes from the last season and improve off them, and often it was the characters and the choices that improved the experience for me.

One of these good points were Joan, the villain of the entire season who was responsible for the death of Prescott, Mariana, and nearly killing Kate after she was shot. However, we see that she was doing it for the greater good, so that the community had the supplies needed to survive until they were able to reach sustainability, but there was something off about how Joan talked about her reasons. All the episode, we’re thought to believe that the men were under David’s rules because they were soldiers, they were his men to lead, and the last person I would suspect is this old lady who’s nice and welcoming to someone, even going as far as to explain why Javier couldn’t be accepted after he murdered one of their own, or was found to be friends with a known thief who and stolen from them before.

But at the end of the episode, I could hear something off about Joan while she was explaining her reasons, or even not at all if you don’t spare Max. She didn’t sound genuine, she didn’t sound sorry for what she did, but she was saying what the other leaders wanted to hear because they didn’t want to accept that she did all these things with a guilt-free conscious, especially faced with accusers who have blood on their own hands. She manipulates them into thinking she did everything for the greater good, and if the player chooses Javier to do some morally-grey things in the previous episodes, such as killing Rufus, killing Max, bludgeoning Badger’s head to mush, and acts unremorseful for doing what he did, it’s a case of choosing between two cases of grey, there’s no one clear case. The others would go for the candidate who didn’t murder their own and break rules by getting their brother back into the community after he was exiled. This characterization is what made Joan compelling, until all of the next episode undid that just like it did with Carver in the last season.

The choices in this episode, while some were anti-climatic, such as with the choice of keeping Mariana’s death to yourself not doing much besides pissing David off for a while, but other choices do affect the story in some way, until once again the next episodes undo all of it. Saving Max is one of the big ones for me, because I noticed that it’s one of the times in both this season, and any choice in the last season, where if Javier chooses to put his trust into someone else, to show compassion even to the face of someone who wronged him, he wasn’t punished by the person turning around and stabbing him in the back. Max did what he said he would do for Javier, he came out about all of Joan’s plans even when the punishment for this was him being exiled or even killed, and while Javier and David are still arrested, it’s not because Javier was wrong for choosing to spare someone but rather that Joan is a masterful manipulator in this episode and knew what to say to make her seem like the one in the right.

It’s like the choices in Season One, it’s harder to spare a life than it is to take a life, especially when you live in a world where taking a life may put you in a better situation. Showing compassion means that you still have your humanity, and you still have something to live for in a harsh world.

#twdg #//long post #ask #the third choice was a hard one #I was orignally gonna go for Thicker Than Water but then I remembered all the things I really didn't like about it #and I enjoyed ATL a lot too

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