And so Clementine’s epic blood soaked journey comes to an appropriate close. Several months back I gave my thoughts on the first chapter of the game, promising to give my assessment of what was, in the end, a very rough ride.
The Walking Dead Season 2’s first episode gave us a very strong opening with a somewhat surprisingly cool lead in the form of Clementine. The girl had to do some seriously tough things in order to survive. In the list of video game protagonists I can name that I’ve seen field dress their own deep wounds only Metal Gear Solid’s Naked Snake and Clementine come to mind. Season 2 saw the once innocent little girl lying, fighting and in some cases even killing her way for a little perceived security and safety.
Now as great as Clem is on her own, few works of zombie fiction get by without introducing us to a cast of survivors that under normal conditions wouldn’t even look at one another in the street, let alone become friends. In season 1 the game’s former protagonist Lee had to do a lot to keep the tribe together for their collective survival. Clementine, for being 10 years old, also had to take on a surprising amount of leadership in telling survivors to straighten up, fly right, while not caring what hearts she trampled on along the way.
If there’s a difference between season 1 and season 2 it’s how much cause and effect your choices made on the incredibly short lives of Walking Dead’s survivors. In season 1 it seemed like choosing one person over the other could have dire consequences on not just one or two individuals, but entire fractions of the group. In season 2 it felt like the plot moved along killing who it was going to kill, and bringing back who it wanted to live, kind of regardless of what you did. Sure you could delay a few deaths, or accelerate them as the case may be, but your choices seemed to have very little impact on the lifespan of each survivor.
Now with that being said it’s not like your choices had no impact. They just did in a different sense. You had people trying to validate themselves by Clem, or who grew to despise Clem, and Clem herself could either be shielded or exposed to some very hardcore, NC-17 events, and occasionally she could even go so far as to be responsible for some of them. It wasn’t so much the physical health of the group that season 2 wanted you to look out for as it was the emotional health. This is an idea that definitely comes to a head in episode 5.
A lot of those smaller, familial bonding choices you made through out the season at least start to come up in episode 5 with people and their feelings towards you and your overall FUBAR situation.Clementine desperately tries to hold it altogether and without spoiling too much, doesn’t exactly do the most stellar job.
For the seeming lack of choices with impact throughout season 2 things come to a head with what’s perhaps the most important choice in the entire Walking Dead series. Sure there’s a little bit of “choose your own ending” syndrome here, but you wouldn’t really go back and undo your choices just to see the other route, would you? In my own opinion this made for a very exciting conclusion to the series, and an emotionally difficult decision given the stakes and overtones of the entire season.
If there’s one criticism I have of season 2 it’s that maybe the episodes were just a little too action packed. It felt like while the story was progressing along at a steady clip, the game was willing to drop everything for the next shootout or zombie herd, and this happened nearly every episode. There could have been just a little bit more breathing room in saving the action, composing it a little better and taking more time with those beats. Good action is like anything else, you have to pace it right and give it emotional meaning for it to be as exciting as it can be. I only mention this because almost everything else in season 2 feels solid and I would have liked to see just as much consideration in these moments as was put into Clementine’s emotional gambits.
The last thing I should mention is season 2’s relevance to season 1. There are a couple of things you might miss if you haven’t played season 1, especially once you get to s2 episode 5, and there’s at least one character that will have more emotional significance if you’ve played the first season, but for the most part season 2 acts as a contained story. What I’m saying here is you can play season 2 without having played season 1, but what kind of jerk does that?
Overall the Walking Dead season 2 is a very solid sequel to season 1. It’s very much worth playing and my thoughts from episode 1 hold that Clementine is one of the best protagonists of 2014. A few folks likely won’t even notice my grievance with the action swells, and the noticeable pitfalls in the choice mechanic don’t subtract from either the story or that signature Telltale stress of making decisions. If you were a fan of season 1 and adventure games, you can’t go wrong making the investment.
