I never really intended to "come back" to Rockstar as it were, I apparently played Vice City when I was 3 and just drove cars into the water, I have a fuzzy memory of CJ walking out of jail after being arrested/killed for the first time in San Andreas, but after beating IV and V twice in my teens (eventually learning about the rest) I didn't really think to bother to keep up.
These are the record breaking games for jockish dudebros and evidently don't have much to say beyond biting remarks at anyone and everyone, a lot of times it feels as if GTA itself is stuck in an intellectual limbo after the attempt at something more grounded with IV didn't pan out. Point is it's not my scene.

Then I played the first 6-7 hours of Red Dead 2 last year courtesy of PSN and I don't think I even realized at the time how much I just naturally sunk into it, it was shocking how quiet it let itself be, how gently it paced itself.
I kept feeling echoes of Death Stranding and Kentucky Route Zero all over, I never fast traveled because as basic as horse-riding is comparatively to something like DS, it's almost meditative when you're out in the open plains with the wilderness all around you even with the potential danger (which made it a lot sadder when you gotta navigate the city which itself feels about as suffocating to Arthur as it does the player).

I truly don't think I was ready for how handmade and personal this felt, it's about as close to its vision as a multi-million AAA can be, I wish it would've gone even harder with the cores system and the entire realism angle really but I guess that's what mods are for. The immersion hiccups with interacting with these portraits of places with real people with real lives are nowhere near as severe as recent GTAs but I imagine your experience may vary.


More than anything I was not ready for the story to not only be so psychologically complex but to strike such a personal chord with how much my own friend groups scatter and drift due to time, conflict or worse things.
I have an intimate understanding of how it feels when you know something is about to fall apart at the seams because of distrust or egos clashing and it really triggered something in me to watch the Vin Der Lande gang's slow decay until it reaches its breaking point. Dutch's evolution as a character is one of the saddest I've seen in recent memory and it didn't even entirely click for me until I remembered his speech from the very beginning, there's a lot of active debate on it but that alone does make me think his change was real.

I do certainly recognize this is already reworking and meshing a ton of Western tropes together into something new but not having the reference for it yet did probably make it a hell of a lot more potent. Not that it isn't on its own already, I don't think you could reasonably adapt this into another medium to "get the story without the video game part in the way" without drastically changing its feel.

The romanticizing of outlaw life and their code of ethics does become very alluring initially considering we're ostensibly all stuck with civilization and mass surveillance and it's not like they don't have points, the way the higher powers of the world have been doing things has been tremendously bad. We're far too in deep for anarcho-primitivism to be a reasonable solution but it is still kind of nice to think about in a twisted sort of way, if only to be rid of all the noise for even a moment.

As much as I like John Marston's scrappy kind of reckless personality, Arthur Morgan fits into this story as a protag perfectly as an anti-hero stuck to his ways that can only work through his personal failings slowly and methodically. It does sometimes border on a bit cloying but there's an air of genuineness that wouldn't be there if it didn't already strike so many different feelings in so many unique places (figuratively and literally), Arthur's mortality is inextricably linked to the gang and their way of life altogether and when they all crash in on themselves at the same time, it's so beautiful, frustrating and so unbelievably tragic.

I guess that's what made RDR2 so effective, in between the bloodshed and drama are very real human connections formed by cruel circumstance, despite the danger there was never any mistaking these were people with hopes and dreams and it never felt more self-evident than when they'd come together to party around camp. I think about the one in Shady Belle a lot, I went to the bedroom after it began quieting down but you could still hear a lot of enthusiastic chatter outside, even when the circumstances kept getting worse, the gang keeps its wits and its humanity even if they're ultimately doomed to split apart and get killed, it's those moments of respite and camaraderie I'll always remember this game by.