Current Events > as much as I like portal 2

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i miss portal's less overtly comedic tone. portal feels mysterious and ominous with understated humor until the end of the game when glados's immaturity ramps up and she starts insulting you out of desperation. glados feels like a believable computer AI gone awry which is trying and failing to understand humans. the game is 99% just listening to glados, an interesting character.

whereas in portal 2 every character is a cartoon character. wheatley is a caricature. cave johnson is a caricature. from the very start of the game, even the anonymous announcer is saying things like "If the Earth is currently governed by a manner of animal-king, sentient cloud, or other governing body that either refuses to or is incapable of listening to reason, th- [RECORDING SHORTS OUT]" In portal 2, the caricatures kind of swallow up any sense of gravity.

it's just all very silly from the get-go. a lot of the jokes feel like reddit comments.

that said, I can also kind of understand WHY portal 2 is different, I don't think it could have been the same as portal. Part of the fun of playing portal the first time is realizing that your computerized guide is actually saying some really messed up things, despite her sterile emotionless voice. Realizing that this isn't just some straightforward test facility, and something is up. By the end of portal, the cat is already kind of out of the bag, and you understand what kind of facility Aperture is, and who's managing it. They couldn't open Portal 2 and redo that sense of discovery. Also, everybody had already had their fill of cake = lie memes by the time portal 2 came out, and the expectation was for more jokes. Trying to pull off a subdued tone in the sequel may not have worked after having seen how insane glados and her personality cores are.

So I still enjoy Portal 2's writing, but it definitely doesn't come close to portal's writing and its more concise story.

I'm not reading that giant post, but if you're saying the second game doesn't have the charm the first game has you are correct.

Irony posted...

I'm not reading that giant post, but if you're saying the second game doesn't have the charm the first game has you are correct.

it's not a giant post. but that is kind of the gist. I'm basically saying it's not as well written, the humor is far wackier, and it feels like the writers were overly fixated on recreating the meme reddit-style humor similar to "cake is a lie", but I also don't think that replicating portal 1's style would have worked for portal 2 either.