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[backupdump001]

The "What I've always wanted to tell you" Meme

maaann i beat last window a couple days ago and now i've kinda forgotten specific things i wanna say

BUT. it was definitely a worthy sequel to hotel dusk. it was really funny, great writing, great characters, plenty of touching moments-- exactly what i expected out of a hotel dusk game. it was (comparitively) faster than hotel dusk and also had a bit tighter storytelling, which i liked a lot, since i remember it took a while for the first game to REALLY hook me/it had a lot of moments where there wasn't much to do, whereas last window seemed to shoot off from the get-go and always gave you direction. being interested from the start COULD just be that hotel dusk is my favorite DS game, lol, but still, i never really had any moments in last window where i was just wandering around knocking on doors and trying to figure out how to make things happen.

last window seemed a lot more difficult than hotel dusk, though; i got way more game overs, but also the story seemed way more overlapping and had so many twists and turns that it was hard for me to keep up with it at all. i think i remember feeling pretty confused after i first played hotel dusk, though, so maybe i just need to play last window again. that's probably kind of the thing with the mystery genre (especially for dumbasses LIKE ME). however, it never got to the point where i felt really frustrated or bored.

something i missed: there was no sidekick in last window, which made this game seem so... alone. maybe this was kind of the point: kyle's given up on bradley (which depresses the shit out of me), so what's left? there's rachel, but you never see her in person and her relationship with kyle is more about information-getting than confiding. maybe you could make a case for ed, but he seems more about information-TELLING (i remember a couple of times where kyle didn't really tell rachel anything and asked for ed, then blabbed about all sorts of stuff), and doesn't seem to really give a shit how kyle feels one way or another. there's mila, i suppose, though she lives in another state and never really sees him (same for kyle's mom). it's like all the people who are kyle's friends are just people over the phone who he never sees and can't seem to talk to a whole lot, and it made me really, really, really miss the fact that hotel dusk had louis.

but again, that could've been the point. both games have the same LEVEL of drive--kyle didn't seem like he was more sad (he actually seemed happier, which surprised me, though i wonder if maybe that was a region thing since apparently the american version of trace memory had a much more sarcastic version of ashley. maybe the american hotel dusk had a more sarcastic kyle too? IDK but tiger mentioned that kyle seemed sadder so) or that he'd given up on life--however, the MOOD and motivations for each drive are so different. both games deal with loss, but hotel dusk has the hope that what's lost will be FOUND, while last window knows that what's lost is never coming back and just wants to know WHY it was lost.

another thing i missed: BRADLEY. he gets mentioned, like, TWICE in the whole game, and it's always just "so i herd u shot ur partner" without any sort of reaction from kyle one way or another. i don't expect there to be nearly as much focus on bradley as there was in the first game, obviously, but i would've loved to have a sentence or two where kyle thinks about him somehow, even just like THIS IS LIKE WHEN BRADLEY AND I USED TO BLAH BLAH
same for louis!! and rosa, and dunning, and iris, and...

that was something that kinda bothered me in general: there were almost no throwbacks to hotel dusk. last window is something that can pretty much stand on its own. for some games, i like that; final fantasy, for example, is a huge fucking series, and if it were just the same characters/story/world all the time then i would probably not give a shit (inb4 but all ff games are the same). but hotel dusk is about making you care. it rides ENTIRELY on having great characters and making THEM your motivation to win. yeah, it has a cool mystery plot, but it only has that plot because of kyle's personal problems and demons that he's trying to come to terms with-- he's not a cop anymore, it's not a game about trying to get the bad guy in jail and saving the day. it's about people and their different paths and issues and flaws. it's about coping. and i just do not think that making the games totally standalone with almost no throwbacks or references is something that works for that sort of story, because all it's going to do is leave people going "BUT WHAT ABOUT THOSE OTHER GUYS" and feeling a bit left in the cold. this isn't to say that last window wasn't moving in its own right (oh god no, it really got me at times), but i just don't like the feeling that kyle's totally left everybody behind, physically and emotionally. it doesn't even seem IC for him, really-- both games have been about him dwelling on the past.

however, the writing in this game is so goddamn good. i've come to expect that from cing, but oh GOD his monologues about him and his mom dealing with his dad's death just hit me right in the heart more than once. the thing about kyle is that YEAH he's a depressing guy and everything, but he's depressing in a way that's upsettingly believable. i think last window did a better job of this, actually; his chapter-starting bradley angst was just LOL no matter what, since it was so melodramatic (WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT AT NIGHT, WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES), but last window was more subtle. after his father was killed, he and his mom walked down the streets of manhattan on christmas eve, feeling too afraid to say anything to anyone. that's it. that's the memory that comes to him; that little snippet of what had changed. the writers didn't try to dwell on it a ton by fluffing it up with a bunch of purple prose and tears and going THIS IS A SAD MOMENT. you can actually imagine someone saying that and experiencing that.

of course, the writers sort of went THIS IS A SAD MOMENT at the end, which made it totally hilarious, lol. BUT IT WASN'T GAME-RUINING.

ANYWAY THAT WAS MY OVERALL IMPRESSION
IT CAME OUT LONGER THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD AND I COULD STILL KEEP GOING LOL.... but i'm getting tired of trying to remember things

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