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Notes -
I do recall liking Kim the best during my 8-10 hours in the game, just for being the reliable straight man most of the time, though I also found him a bit on the dull side. Some of the other characters had really fun and outlandish personalities, but what got me for those was how much the writing just took me out of the game. It constantly made me picture some writer sitting at his desk typing out all this clever dialogue out in between break sessions to sniff his own farts. To some extent, I'm consciously aware that all video game writing is created this way, but when I think of writing in works like this being "good," part of it is that it momentarily, and perhaps only on an emotional level, makes me forget that the people I see on screen are merely marionettes being puppeteered by an author for the purpose of manipulating my emotions and instead makes me believe that this is a real person with a real history in some real world expressing himself. I want the writing to manipulate my emotions, not to remind me that it's trying to manipulate my emotions.
(Aside: this is a major part of the criticism - tangentially "woke"-related* - of the drop in quality of writing in the MCU, where everyone is a clever quip-machine all the time. When a handful of high profile characters like Tony Star talk this way, it was funny and somewhat plausible, but when almost every major character talks like this, the suspension of disbelief is harder to maintain, on top of just being tiresome).
To be fair, I think the voice acting, particularly the (likely intentionally?) overdramatic ones for the various emotions or characteristics of yours who would speak to you, didn't help. And the game started right off the bat with such internal monologue and never clawed its way back in my
eyesears. So I may be unfairly docking it points for that instead of just the writing.* Obviously there's nothing about the "woke" ideology that insists on stilted writing in and of itself. But it's still tangentially related, because the "woke" influence being discussed is modern political messaging being inserted into the writing for the purpose of influencing the audience's behaviors, and due to the totalizing nature of the "woke" mindset, the authors have trouble doing this with a soft-enough touch to feel natural within the fictional world. Which then reminds the player that they're being lectured to by a script writer, rather than being immersed in a fictional world.
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