Bioshock 2 is called "one of the best games of our generation" by a lot of gamers. While it's certainly a good game, and certainly a game you can tell had some imagination behind it, I wouldn't say it's one of the best games of the generation. Maybe top 15 on the Xbox 360, which hardly qualifies as "one of the best", in my opinion.The weird thing about Bioshock is that it's story doesn't make any sense, both in terms of logistics and structure. I know I didn't take a ton of time out to understand every little story detail, but I've played both games and typically in games I'll appreciate a good story when it's there, but still pick up on what's going on if the game's story is boring or just poorly told. Besides, when an avid gamer picks up a game and can barely understand or barely cares about what is going on, then that's bad design at some level or another.
Here's the story as I understand it:
Overall/Backstory - There's an underwater city in the Atlantic Ocean called Rapture. It was a bustling marvel of modern technology but the introduction of DNA alterations (plasmids) and the power to get those alterations basically left the city as a tattered wasteland (I assume because the users of the plasmids used their powers irresponsibly). I honestly couldn't tell you how the little sisters make any sense regarding where they come from or why they're going out in a dangerous place to extract Adam from corpses. I got the point of them being hypnotized to a degree as explained in Bioshock 2, but why make a little girl go get it when their big, bad protectors (Big Daddys) are more than able to kill splicers and extract their Adam, assuming the hypnotizing would work on them, too. I would think that it would considering they are mindlessly protecting little girls for no apparent reason.
So, whatever. I accepted that the back story has gaping holes and that if you try to think about any of it making sense you're just wasting your time. Trying to explain it to somebody that has never played the game before always warrants a ton of questions that you can't possibly answer.
Bioshock - You are some mystery person whose plane crashes in the ocean, and you happen to stumble upon a building in the water. Inside the building is an underwater elevator that takes you to an underwater city - Rapture. When you get there you find a radio and a random person that you've never met is on the other end. He tells you what he wants you to do, so at this point you can assume that you have no free will of your own. It turns out that the guy telling you what to do is really the bad guy and you have to fight him at the end. If you do things "the right way" I suppose you go back to the surface and.. die in the very last scene? Okay? The only story reward is whether or not you save the little girls. I'm not sure why I should care about little demon girls in the first place, but, okay. Sure. Whatever. Good game. Story doesn't make much sense. But, good game nonetheless.
Bioshock 2 - When the game begins it never goes out of it's way to say you're a new character, so I guess you're supposed to start assuming the most basic of story details. For a while I thought I was playing as the same character considering you were impersonating a big daddy at the end of the first game. I suppose you're not the same character, even though I assumed that you were playing as the same character but in a different time period than the first game. Actually, for all I know, you could still be the same character since you didn't know a thing about your original character and the game never bothers to tell you who you are in either game.
So, you start up the game from the perspective of a Big Daddy, protecting a little sister. You get hypnotized by a plasmid that a splicer uses on you, shoot yourself in the head and die. You wake up, not knowing exactly how you're still alive (10 years later) or why it took this long to "wake up. Again, a random person on the radio tells you your (his) objectives and you're supposed to go do it. He wants you to go find that little sister that you were with when you shot yourself in the head, but isn't ever clear as to why this particular little sister is important considering I was under the impression that relationships between a particular little sister and big daddy were random. So, you fight your way through and discover that this little sister is apparently your actual daughter and the lady keeping her from you is the girl's mother, which would make you her husband? Or maybe she's just your baby's momma. Whatever. Again, if there are any story inaccuracies it's due to me misinterpreting them due to the story being poorly structured.
There's several points of Bioshock 2's story where the developers make a pathetic attempt at attaching emotion to a situation. For example, you run across some guy who locks himself in a security station and this person on the radio is telling you that "he's the one that made you like this! Kill him!" Okay? So, all of a sudden I'm supposed to get enraged and go berserk on this guy I just met 5 seconds ago? But, of course, you have to because the guy on the radio is telling you to. The whole story is essentially a quest to put an end to whatever made you a big daddy and then get your daughter but honestly I never cared about any of the objectives. The only way I was ever informed of these big story changes was plain dialogue overlapping gameplay. It's easy to ignore and easy to not care about what is going on.
For the most part, you are entirely unimportant in relation to what is going on. In both games you're channeling the requests of a mysterious person on a radio and doing what they say because that's what the game is. You might as well be playing Myst and exploring random, mysterious things on some mystical island (city, in this case), and assume you have no knowledge of how anything works, who you are, why you're there or what the point of all of this is. The only reason there is a story is because you need to explore those places of interest and figure out what is going on to continue with the game. I don't see a difference between the two games' story structures.
The entire universe of Bioshock barely makes sense as it is (even though they attempt to explain aspects of it), which makes me think that the story is actually pretty similar to the Silent Hill series. And no, I'm not talking about the movie.
In Silent Hill, though, you accept that the world that you're in is a psychological world rather than the literal world, so things not quite making sense are acceptable. You can still piece together the vague stories from most of the games, and do it quite well. The only game that you're not totally sure is a mind-trap is Silent Hill 4, because I couldn't ever tell if that was supposed to be real or not, or maybe a mixture of the two since it starts to blend together at the end. They didn't have any huge universe fallacies such as concrete rules like the big daddy/little sister relationship though, and didn't even try to explain anything about it, so it did a good job of making things vague and doing it on purpose.
In Bioshock, the world is supposed to be reality, but the backbone of the universe still doesn't make much sense. The problem is that they actually try to explain some of it, and yet it still doesn't make sense. So they expect you to take things literally, but then fail at making you care about it.
When it starts to get this convoluted, people stop caring, which makes me wonder why the developers went so far to try to tell a story anyway. I'm an avid gamer and love a great story just as much as anybody. But, when I stop caring about a story in an otherwise good game then it's got some serious issues.
Anybody feeling the urge to discuss the logistics of the story behind Bioshock, be my guest. My instinct tells me that the best anybody can do is completely guess because of tiny insinuations that probably shouldn't be read into, so.. let's see what I got wrong.
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