Finally, after months post-release we get around to concluding our podcast series on The Walking Dead Season 2.
It has been interesting to see the reception of Season 2 over Season 1. I feel that it’s a little more than the fact in 2012 The Walking Dead was new and fresh to people and in 2014 it wasn’t. As we say in our wrap up Season 2 is a little bit of a mess, one way or another. It struggled to connect to its audience the same way the first season seemed to do almost instantly. Or maybe our memories may be sugar coating the first season a little bit.
Frankly, while I’m not as high on Season 2 as I was on Season, I still think this is one of the most attentions deserving games of the year. The craftsmanship and attempts are greater narrative depth is commendable. In fact, I’d say that in part some of the lesser reception it has received is due to Season 2 offering no simple answer to what its theme is. It has a lot of competing subjects it wants to talk about, often talking over one another than causes us to be muddled about them in our minds. That and Telltale’s recent move away from episodic content that is episodic in nature rather than delivery. I’ve speculated before that maybe Season 2 has more in common with The Wolf Among Us than Season 1. They aren’t standalone bits but just broken apart pieces of the larger whole.
I really like that we got to chat in depth about the central dichotomy figures, Kenny and Jane. For all the shellacking The Walking Dead and Telltale gets for their dichotomy presentation of choices, there is nothing simple or binary about their options. I feel that saying these characters feel like “actual characters” or “real people” is becoming a meaningless buzzword in and of themselves without any real merit. Often used for entities that contain an attention getting charisma and not whether there was anything behind a special delivery of the same exposition in characters that are just cardboard cutouts. The Walking Dead characters feel human to me, because they are fuck ups, because there is no good and evil inherent in their beings only in their actions and most of all because they don’t always think they’re right but will never admit it.
I like the format of our Telltale podcasts. It didn’t work as well with The Wolf Among Us as the role-play possibility space was smaller, but in The Walking Dead you really are defining a character. My Clementine is different from Nick’s Clementine who is different from Chris’ Clementine. Our discussion centering around the personal seems more right in this series than any other, but it wasn’t until I heard myself say “I can only hope the thoughts frantically going through my head are also going through the character’s head.” That was in reference to the game as a visual medium unlike an internal one like a book, but it also perfectly encapsulates something about the nature of this game as a whole. The mentality of Clementine is the player’s own mentality. A navigation of the possibility space the character will allow alongside our own internal rational for the external actions. Our format highlights it well even if we don’t outright say this point often enough.
If you’ve been listening to our discussions on the episodes up to this point, don’t stop now and listen to us close out Clementine’s story.
“Well, it’s not like math Clem. Sometimes there isn’t a right answer.”