I'm not asking for Herman Melville's X-Men or Flannery O'Connor's Superman. But the interplay between the two timeframes feels gimmicky, the gameplay slaved to a backward-forward story slaved to a progression-related contrivance. The writers use the prison segments as training sessions to unlock new abilities for Fetch to deploy in subsequent flashbacks.
The game cuts between Seattle-based flashbacks, set before Fetch loses her brother, and her two-year incarceration in Curdun Cay, a prison for superhumans overseen by *Second Son'*s lecturing villain. As you put this tortured soul through the game's paces, Fetch seems, at most, slightly perturbed.Įven the narrative framework comes off as forced. The sense that you're playing as a tormented woman sucked into a psychogenic maelstrom never registers during missions that amount to picking off opponents in slightly different ways. It doesn't help that what passes for character development winds up crowbarred into the cutscenes, dragging you along for the ride. The Infamous series' trademark good-evil seesaw doesn't exist in this installment, lending Fetch's victims the moral gravitas of tenpins. The writers motivate Fetch by stealing what she wants (her brother), then they gate him behind a misogynistic kidnapper who spends the game goading Fetch from a cell phone like a drawling (literally) frat boy. Instead, First Light trots out another superhero potboiler that lets Fetch mostly off the hook. Telling her origin story in First Light was an opportunity to dig a little deeper in the dirt, a chance to give us a look inside the mind of someone broken and driven to butchery. When we meet Fetch midway through Second Son, she’s a demented killer reeling from the loss of her brother and reveling murderously in her godlike abilities.
She was calamity reified, an ex-junkie prone to panic attacks and moments of homicidal insanity. He was a wannabe hooligan in a beanie, a sulking anti-hipster with authority issues.
Fetch should have been a more interesting protagonist than Delsin from Second Son.