I found this game to be very disappointing. The game hooked me with its impressive first mission in its demo, and I played THE FUCK out of it. I grinded out every outcome and branch of its flowchart and found the game to be conceptually amazing. Unfortunately, the game never reached this height for me again (The ending and a couple of Markus' missions got CLOSE, and were definitely highlights, but it never really got there). I think the problem with this game is the super on-the-nose historical plagiarism, which makes me not take a single thing in it seriously, no matter how much it tries. Even looking at this game as a casual audience, you start to notice how forced some of its commentary is and how dumb some of it starts to look. I thought the Kara storyline would be effective due to the way it set up its abusive household subplot. It felt like that's what the focus of the whole thing should've been. However, it reaches its climax almost immediately and then turns into some on-the-run, android child nonsense. The Zlatko mission of this game is one of the worst written missions in the game. The game randomly transitions to Kara and Alice going to an android haven that wasn't mentioned at all previously, only for a certain outcome to cause Kara to lose her memory, only for her to regain it somehow, and then rescuing Alice? The game, despite the amount of options it gives you, doesn't write the game to fit your narrative properly unless you do what it wants, completely ruining the point of the game and turning itself into a QTE nightmare you can't wake up from. Some missions are incredible and others are like Zlatko. Kara's storyline after the first couple chapters only serves to bog down the pacing and give you an extremely cliched story to go along with it. I could guess the plot twist with Alice about halfway through.

Markus, on the other hand, has a decent story and awesome setpieces, paired with some of the most shoehorned commentary on minorities I have ever seen. The BLM logo and "Android Lives Matter" as possible mottos for the android movement during the march segment? Really, David Cage? It really does feel like a plot written by a very out-of-touch racist (which he is). This game has ZERO NUANCE. AT ALL. Going back to the Kara segment. We have to write an abusive dad? How many cliches can we fit into one archetype? Let's see, estranged wife? Drug use? Using a belt? Y'know what, fuck it, THROW IT ALL IN THERE. We want the androids to be an analogy for minorities in America. Y'know what we should do? HAVE THEM SING A SLAVE SONG AT THE END OF THE GAME. It's SOOOOOO FORCED.

The only redeeming quality of this entire game is Connor. His arc and relationship with Hank is well-written. However, even his parts are not without flaws. Who or what the fuck was RA-9? We spend the ENTIRE GAME looking for this messiah and he never shows up. And no, IT'S NOT MARKUS. We'd been hunting this guy before he even discovered Jericho, let alone when he became their leader. We never get an answer and only one very specific ending leads us to believe it might've been the android creator we'd met earlier, but even that implication was vague. His storyline also can't save the abysmal pacing of the game, and sometimes even contributes to it because Quantic Dream just didn't know how to structure it.

The only reason this game still gets an okay rating from me is because it still does have its moments at times, and because I have never seen this much of choice, options, and outcomes in a choice game ever. It's A LOT. So credit where credit is due. The bottom line is that there is a lot to see and explore in this game, but not a lot of it is great.