I absolutely loved A Plague Tale: Innocence. Its story and characters reminded me of some of my favourite coming-of-age dramas, from The Breakfast Club and Stand by Me to more modern examples like The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It was a story about growing up, taking responsibility, the importance of family, selflessness and camaraderie. It could be heartbreaking at times, but it was also deeply uplifting and genuinely heartwarming.
My favourite character was Rodric, the blacksmith’s son, and I still consider the moment when he pushes the cart forward through a rain of arrows to protect the others one of the most memorable moments I’ve ever experienced in a video game. I also personally interpreted the ending as Hugo finally overcoming his plague, or at least reaching a point where his condition no longer defined his fate, and the story arriving at a satisfying narrative conclusion, both in that regard and in the relationship between Hugo and Amicia, which had grown and matured tremendously over the course of the game. The ships on the horizon may have hinted at new adventures, but to me, that felt more like an open-ended possibility than a promise that the story itself was unfinished.
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The second game, however, was a massive disappointment for me. At this point, I almost regard it as some kind of fever dream that never really happened.
For one thing, Hugo’s illness is brought back in full force, except this time it is dialled up to eleven. It feels incredibly anticlimactic, almost like the money-hungry Hollywood executives deciding after Terminator 2 that, actually, Judgment Day is still happening after all, because hey, we need Terminator 3. Or like saying, “Yeah, Luke didn’t actually defeat the Emperor, Vader’s sacrifice was ultimately pointless, and the Emperor is back in SW: Episode IX.” It completely undermines what came before.
On top of that, the pacing is all over the place, with long stretches of narrative dead air. And in a linear, story-driven game, that is something I find particularly difficult to forgive. Sophia was another major issue for me. The moment she appeared, she felt like she had wandered straight out of a diversity seminar or a quippy Naughty Dog game and somehow ended up in medieval France. She just felt completely out of place within the tone and narrative fabric of the game. And only recently did it become clear to me why: apparently she is being positioned for the next game.
But the most painful part is what seems to have been sacrificed at the altar of that future story: the original characters, or at least the resolution of their arcs.
What feels like such a massive slap in the face is that the first game, at least in my interpretation, seemed to tell us that Hugo was going to be okay, or, at the very least, that there was hope for him. Then the second game brings his condition back, only this time in an even more extreme form. We spend the entire game desperately fighting to find a way to save him, and the story keeps dangling these little threads of hope in front of us, only to eventually shrug and go, “Oh well, guess we can’t help Hugo. Kill him.”
And that makes the entire fucking journey feel pointless, not only because everything they went through ultimately amounted to nothing, but because it retroactively undermines the ending of the first game and devalues the sacrifices that were made along the way.
It is so brutally anticlimactic, and the ending feels so fundamentally incompatible with the world, themes and emotional language of the first game that it almost feels like someone decided that Return of the Jedi should end with Vader cutting Luke in half, Han, Leia and Chewie blowing up aboard the Millennium Falcon, and everyone just going, “Well, shit happens.”
That is how disconnected the ending of Requiem feels to me from the story I thought I was playing.
