So I watched all the cutscenes and endings I was missing in Metro 2033, as well as the beginning and the good end of Last Light. I can’t talk about how eye rollingly terrible all of it was without spoilers.
I should've just played Yakuza 0.
So the player in the cutscenes I watched did a thing where he was putting on and taking off his gas mask repeatedly. I was watching this, thinking “wait, why is he … no. NO. Are you fucking kidding me?”
It turns out that the way gas masks work in the game is they reset your choking state. You can run around breathing radioactive toxic gases for minutes on end, but simply putting on a gas mask for a few seconds makes it all better. You just have to be willing to put up with the constant sounds of your player character choking and gagging to death for however long it takes to get to the next filter stash.
Of course, this is a video game. Sticking yourself with an syrette does not magically heal bullet wounds or mauling in real life either. But it’s also an expected convention – the notion that our player character can be magically healed by food items has been a given going back to arcade days. But there’s something about the whole filter situation that was just a bridge too far for me – and I am definitely not going to spend 20 minutes listening to ASMR vom gagging to get through a sequence.
Anyway, both Metro 2033 and Last Light have good and bad endings. In 2033, the bad ending, where you nuke the Dark Ones, is the default. If you don’t engage with the morality system at all, you won’t even have the option to choose a different ending. As Austin mentioned on stream, there’s something called an “enlightenment” system, where you earn points by doing things at specific points in the game. Those things are incredibly obtuse, and really only doable if you have an FAQ open while you’re playing. Every act earns you an enlightenment point, and you need somewhere around 8 or 9 points to trigger the choice option.
If you earn those points, at the end of the game, after you gun down the Dark One who’s been chasing you in the psychic realm, you will have the option to control the handgun when you get back to reality. You can then either empty a clip into the wounded Dark One who’s lying in front of you (earning the Bad ending), or shoot the missile guidance system (saving the Dark Ones, and earning the Good ending).
I have a strong suspicion that the good ending is going to be the crux of the Waypoint 101 discussion … and I just wanna say that everything about it is bullshit.
The problem is that the game sets up the Dark Ones as being the good guys from the jump. It is not subtle about this; the Dark Ones flat out save you a number of times in the game, and in the visions they show you, they’re never shown attacking, only defending themselves. The soldiers being mind broken is implied to be an unfortunate side effect of their powers.
Given all that, it doesn’t really make sense that your character would go along with a plan to just nuke the Dark Ones at all. It super doesn’t make sense that you would murder a Dark One at the end of the game, then at the very last second think “ah, fuck it”, and decide not to nuke them. There’s nothing in the narrative that justifies anything that happens after you meet Khan, because at that point you should be suspicious enough as a character to want to investigate further.
(Speaking of Khan: I’m gonna be real curious what the staff make of his fortune cookie violence breeds violence bit, especially set against Artyom’s diary entries about how the grunts in the Red and Nazi armies are both equally miserable. Listening to the background conversations of the Nazi grunts paints them as being like dumb cult converts, willing to label anyone and everyone else a mutant out of ignorance. White supremacy is a real thing, and the game’s insistence that white supremacy would change into human supremacy after the apocalypse is not great.)
Oh, and that good ending? It’s not canon. The very first scene of Metro: Last Light is you having nightmares after genociding the Dark Ones. Worse, the entirety of Last Light is basically working towards a redo of that good ending, where the remaining Dark Ones decide to save your bacon again, then literally walk off into the sunset.
I mean … when the franchise itself undercuts its own message for the sake of pumping out another game, I don’t think 2033 has any legs left to stand on.
I agree that the sequences with human enemies are probably the most fun parts of the game, especially if you have silenced weapons with IR scopes. They’re also the easiest parts by far, unless you’re fighting on the surface where filters limit your time. There’s a part in the game where you’re supposed to turn off a generator to sneak around guards, but I just kind of shrugged and headshotted every last Nazi, blowing out lights along the way.
Anything with monsters is a slog. Most of the monsters can warp jump at you, which means most fights in open spaces are just sprinting around to maintain distance while taking shots. Unless you’ve cheesed the game to stock up on military ammo, shotguns are the only practical weapon, and reload times mean they get free hits on you. But the game also has monster sequences where you’re stuck in closed spaces, and those parts are insufferable.
