brainygamer
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Registered: 07/13/08
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Posted 07/15/08
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#1
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Post your comments on chapter 2 here.
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sparky
Registered: 07/14/08
Posts: 167
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Posted 07/25/08
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#2
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I finished chapter 2 last night (I play long sessions), and I have to say I thought it was far superior to part 1. The locations in Rubacava clearly reference classic film locales (docksides, smoky clubs, dark alleys), and the pervasive criminal influence is definitely reminiscent of noir films.
Atmosphere aside, I also thought the chapter was much better from the puzzle aspect. In Year 1, the puzzles are very discrete and generally must be solved in order, because Manny's goal changes after every one. Year 2, on the other hand, presents an integrated series of puzzles that can, by and large, be solved simultaneously. Manny has a single goal throughout the chapter, and each individual problem makes sense as a step towards achieving that goal.
The puzzles keep you moving through the various locations repeatedly, and the feeling of a man on the go through the seedy underbelly of a glamorous town definitely feeds the film aesthetic. This is aided by the fact that almost every puzzle in this year involves manipulating people and playing them off each other; very noirish. The gameplay and the presentation gel here in a wonderful way.
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Flitcraft
Registered: 07/15/08
Posts: 9
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Posted 07/25/08
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#3
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Quote: Originally Posted by sparky
I finished chapter 2 last night (I play long sessions), and I have to say I thought it was far superior to part 1. The locations in Rubacava clearly reference classic film locales (docksides, smoky clubs, dark alleys), and the pervasive criminal influence is definitely reminiscent of noir films.
Atmosphere aside, I also thought the chapter was much better from the puzzle aspect. In Year 1, the puzzles are very discrete and generally must be solved in order, because Manny's goal changes after every one. Year 2, on the other hand, presents an integrated series of puzzles that can, by and large, be solved simultaneously. Manny has a single goal throughout the chapter, and each individual problem makes sense as a step towards achieving that goal.
The puzzles keep you moving through the various locations repeatedly, and the feeling of a man on the go through the seedy underbelly of a glamorous town definitely feeds the film aesthetic. This is aided by the fact that almost every puzzle in this year involves manipulating people and playing them off each other; very noirish. The gameplay and the presentation gel here in a wonderful way.
Total agreement from me. I'm not sure the game ever tops this chapter. Visually, musically, dramatically, and ludicly (which just has a better ring than saying "gameplay-wise") the game is at its best. I love that the puzzles are so perfectly interlocking, and the game gives you a free hand in what order you want to go about tackling them.
For the moment, though, I just want to talk about the imagery. This chapter is loaded with just unforgettable sights. The bridge leading the racetrack, the surreal and eerie statue of Justice looming over the police station (and the lighting that's thrown on it), Membrillo in the morgue, and the harsh white light on the flowers... Year 2 just makes me want to crawl through the screen and into that world, because it is so packed with style.
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karln
Registered: 07/21/08
Posts: 8
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Posted 07/25/08
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#4
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I agree, I loved Year 2, both for the atmosphere and the degree to which the puzzles make sense in terms of Manny's goals. However, there was one exception: for a long time I was baffled by Manny's apparent desire for a metal detector. I had missed a certain inventory item (hopefully you'll know the one I mean) in another part of town which helps create the situation in which a metal detector becomes useful, but as soon as I met Carla, Manny was obviously very keen to get his hands on that detector, to the point of acting like a jerk to do so. So, since the puzzle was there to be solved, I solved it and finally had this detector in my pocket, which left me thinking 'OK... now I have a metal detector. Why did I just do all that?'
It doesn't matter all that much, but it kind of broke the sense of taking reasonable steps to achieve Manny's goals, which is a shame because that sense held up very well the rest of the time.
The only other problem I had that I can recall (I finished playing this game about a week before this dissection was announced, coincidentally) was that in a couple of places, I had got the correct solutions to a puzzle but hit the wrong interact point and therefore thought I must be wrong - once in the kitty litter area, and once in the tattoo parlour which is of course pretty crowded. Possibly some more detailed failure messages may have helped make it clear that I was aiming at the wrong target :/
Loved the ticket-maker puzzle. Didn't get the clue for the day of the week, but by deduction from available evidence (yay!) I got the week and race #, so I figured I may as well just try the 7 days in turn. Which felt kinda good in itself. BTW does anybody know what happens if you try asking about that particular race before you have the relevant item?
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brainygamer
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Registered: 07/13/08
Posts: 524
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Posted 07/25/08
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#5
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Ooh, you guys are making me very excited about Year 2. I'm trying not to read ahead, but I can't help myself! Just arrived in Rubacava.
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hungSolo
Registered: 07/22/08
Posts: 15
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Posted 07/26/08
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#6
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Quote: karln said:
I had got the correct solutions to a puzzle but hit the wrong interact point and therefore thought I must be wrong - once in the kitty litter area, and once in the tattoo parlour which is of course pretty crowded.
Yes, it can be difficult to navigate and highlight hot spots when you're "tiny" Manny, shrunk by perspective to the size of a dime on the screen. I assume the problem I ran into in the kitty litter room is the same one you're referring to.
Sorry to hear the rest of the game might not measure up to Year 2. I never made it past Rubacava the first time I tried Grim Fandango.
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Atomicvege
Registered: 07/15/08
Posts: 43
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Posted 07/27/08
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#7
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I finished up year 2 tonight. I remember when i first played the game and it went from the linear progression of Year 1 to having a whole town open to me in Year 2. As a long time adventure game fan, i was disappointed at the time. I used to prefer linear progression because that meant only one puzzle was usually standing in my way and i just had to solve it. In an open world, there are usually many puzzle strains that you have to follow. These days i enjoy that. It means that if i'm stuck on one part, i can work on another.
Most of Year 2 came back to me pretty quickly. I love all the characters and the angles going on and Manny really starts coming into his own (and like in Year 1, anything to do with Glottis is gold).
I had two annoyances. One was i kept walking back in the elevator or entering Toto's Tattoo parlour by accidentally pressing the wrong button or the enter key. Well the second isn't really an annoyance, but man... with all the steps you have to go through to get Lola's picture, the woman must have been a mastermind to do all that before Nick caught up with her. ><
Lastly, the transition from Year 2 to Year 3 added with what went down in Rubecava lends some clues to why Manny was stuck doing community service. The man is obviously a born entrepreneur. My guess is that while not wanting to hurt people, he probably caused a lot of grief in life on his way to the top.
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brainygamer
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Registered: 07/13/08
Posts: 524
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Posted 07/28/08
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#8
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I had to take a couple of days off to deal with real life stuff, but I'm looking forward to diving back into Year 2. Sort of missed 'ol Manny and Glottis.
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Quinn
Registered: 07/14/08
Posts: 21
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Posted 07/29/08
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#9
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Just finished Year 2, and I really enjoyed it. Not only would I love to vacation in Rubacava, but it was a well-paced and well-designed series of puzzles with some solid storytelling tying it together. I particularly liked the nonlinearity with which you can approach your three different goals, even if it did lead to some weird exchanges, like karln mentioned with the metal detector (it seemed strange to me too).
There were hardly any moments of frustration for me here, except for the fact that Manny kept boarding that damn elevator (the one between his clifftop and the Blue Casket) when I didn't want him to.
The start of Year 3 was particularly dramatic, so I can't wait to get into it.
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shibbyo
Registered: 07/15/08
Posts: 9
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Posted 07/30/08
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#10
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Wow, I just finished Year 2 for the first time and realized that I was about ten minutes away from beating it. I was stumped on the ticket-maker puzzle for a good couple years until this afternoon. Coming up with the solution (especially the Day of the Week on the maker) was probably the hardest I've thought about a video game in a long time. The moment of realization was so damn satisfying.
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davidcarlton
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Registered: 07/15/08
Posts: 548
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Posted 08/01/08
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#11
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I finished year 2 last night (I played it over the course of three nights), and in several ways I didn't like it as much as year 1.
I spent my first play session getting familiar with the environments; what this mostly meant was that I wandered all over the map, repeatedly. Typically, over the course of one wander, I would solve a few puzzles, which meant that the next time I wandered through the whole area, some other state had changed in some other area, giving me another puzzle to solve there.
By the end of the first play session, I'd gotten far enough that I knew what the three overarching puzzles were, that I'd made it at least a step or two along each of them, and I had a pretty good idea of what at least one later step was going to be in each of them.
My second play session was pretty frustrating. I managed to make a little bit more progress; but I was also starting to get stuck on the puzzles. And, at this point, the environment was getting in my way: I'd had lots of experience with situations where doing something in area 1 meant that now somebody would have appeared in area 2 on the other side of the map. So I constantly had this double-whammy of, on the one hand, feeling that I was probably stuck but, on the other hand, having to run all over the map just to make sure that I really did have to solve one of the puzzles that I was aware of, instead of needing to go find some newly-triggered event.
There were also a few red herrings that didn't improve my mood - e.g. for all I knew, reading poetry was a necessary part of solving a puzzle. And there are a lot of areas that are nice in terms of scenery but useless in terms of gameplay. (E.g. the path to your club.) And there's that elevator that it's almost impossible to avoid running into. (Tip: you can hit escape to eliminate the cut scene there.) At some point, I accidentally noticed that hitting shift-keypad-5 teleports you to more or less the middle of most rooms; this can speed up your transit time, but there are at least two rooms (the morgue and the room with the aforementioned elevator) where doing that teleports you to a location that you can't get out of, forcing you to reload from a saved game.
So on my third playthrough session, I hit gamefaqs early and often. Hmm, I'm trying to get the metal detector out of the cat pit? Let's try the scythe - it waves around, but doesn't pick up anything. Am I doing the right thing or not? No more messing around for five minutes experimenting, I'll just look it up.
In fact, despite the fact that the puzzles in year two are a lot more coherent than in year one, I did a lot worse job of solving them on my own. Part of this is just that there are more puzzles. But part of it is that the puzzles in year 1 are much more localized, and the year 1 puzzles that make no sense at all (i.e. the petrified forest ones) are very localized indeed. The only year 1 situation where I remember running over portions of the map not being sure what to do was when I was trying to steal a good work order; having to do that once is okay (and indeed I managed to solve that puzzle myself), but having to do that all the time wasn't as good for me.
Don't get me wrong, I liked the environment, its coherence, the fact that the puzzles were integrated into the environment. But the actual puzzle solving was a bit of a downer.
Glottis really does look dashing in a white tuxedo, though.
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danbruno
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Registered: 07/14/08
Posts: 155
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Posted 08/02/08
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#12
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Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first: the puzzles are spread out over the whole city of Rubacava and require too much dull backtracking. Some of the programming felt a little rough around the edges — I waved my scythe around for ten minutes before managing to hit upon the exact spot to pick up the metal detector, for example, and I once had to reload from a not-so-recent save because I suddenly couldn’t move. And the elevator outside the Blue Casket was a bit too eager for passengers, often grabbing me as I innocently passed by.
Implementation details aside, though, I thought Year 2 was head and shoulders above Year 1. The puzzles never felt “cheap” or “illegitimate,” as they sometimes did in the first act; within fifteen minutes of wandering Rubacava, I had a good sense of what had to be done, even if I didn’t know how I’d do it. Clear goals go a long way towards making puzzle-solving feel rewarding.
That’s not to say that I fared much better at Year 2’s puzzles, of course. Though my adventure game muscles are recovering from their atrophy, I’m fairly inept at the genre at my best. Things seem to have improved, somehow, though; I still consulted the walkthrough when I got stuck, but I made enough progress on my own that I didn’t feel like I was cheating through the game.
To that end, I was very pleased by Year 2’s nonlinearity. Getting hung up on one section didn’t bring my progress grinding to a halt, as I could just try my hand at something else. I tend to check GameFAQs out of frustration more than boredom, so when I’m not up against a wall I’m willing to I do have to say, though, that the dialogue occasionally betrayed the puzzles, most obviously when Manny shows a keen interest in Carla’s metal detector before he has any reason to do so.
Speaking of Carla, the game’s narrative elements really come into their own in the second act, with the film noir style coming through especially well. Year 1 had its share of memorable characters and moments, but the writing in Rubacava’s scenes is really top-notch, from the Blue Casket beatniks to the poetry readings to Glottis’ drunken one-liners to the low-rent revolutionary Sea-Bees. And my favorite scene so far — the back-room conversation featuring Carla’s sob story and Manny’s rapidly changing dialog options — literally had me laughing until I was crying.
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brainygamer
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Registered: 07/13/08
Posts: 524
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Posted 08/02/08
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#13
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Quote: Originally Posted by danbruno
... And my favorite scene so far — the back-room conversation featuring Carla’s sob story and Manny’s rapidly changing dialog options — literally had me laughing until I was crying.
I'm so glad you mentioned this scene, Dan. I was guffawing. That's right, guffawing. Now I ask you, when was the last time a video game made you guffaw?! 
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danbruno
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Registered: 07/14/08
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Posted 08/02/08
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#14
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Quote: Originally Posted by brainygamerQuote: Originally Posted by danbruno
... And my favorite scene so far — the back-room conversation featuring Carla’s sob story and Manny’s rapidly changing dialog options — literally had me laughing until I was crying. I'm so glad you mentioned this scene, Dan. I was guffawing. That's right, guffawing. Now I ask you, when was the last time a video game made you guffaw?!
It may well be the hardest I've ever laughed (or guffawed!) at a video game. Games that I describe as funny (e.g., EarthBound) are usually the type to elicit a wry smirk, not uproarious laughter, but Grim Fandango bucks the trend.
(I also love the follow-up where Manny asks if Carla wouldn't happen to have another metal detector lying around. Comedy gold.  )
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Karkacabra
Registered: 10/24/08
Posts: 29
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Posted 11/23/08
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#15
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I started playing Grim Fandange, as I had a copy laying around, and I'm finding year 2 intensely frustrating. The controls are horrible, and the response to failed attempts at solving puzzles is horrible. I'm currently reading FAQs, and they all say to talk to Charlies the con artist for a fake VIP pass, and when I try, Manny just says he has nothing to say to him. I'll have another go at it, but the combination of first trying the area myself then going to Gamefaqs isn't working smoothly.
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