I guess at the end of the day, I feel baited and hooked by the whole setting. You create Columbia, which looks great and feels great but once you start to analyze it a little you realize is just a hollow set piece for Schrödinger's Catastrophe.
I think that stands for alot of media, not just video games.
Hell you could argue that the Titantic was a film that created a setting about inequality (the people who drowned first, the irish, the blacks, the poor of the poor), but as we all know Jack and Rose was the main theme of this narrative.
Same with Infinite. The ship is Columbia, while Jack and Rose, the main narrative components/the stars, are Booker and Elizabeth.
This occurs for alot of films as well, titanic is just the first one that came to mind.
And that, I feel, is a failure of this game. It's ludonarrative dissonance. You have a place that seems to embody turn of the century Americana and the grotesqueries of our nature, but then the game just uses it for something entirely different. Which, I feel, is a waste of potential for the setting.
This isn't a failure of the game. It's a failure based on your expectations. The game never promised on the back off the box that this is main revolving theme. None of the media even showed that either (just random occurrences here and there).
You just personally wanted this to be the core theme, and was incredibly disappointed when you discovered it was the backdrop rather than the main catalyst that drove the narrative forward.
I don't think it's a bad game, I just think it's worth criticizing, and like its predecessor it's more shallow than people give it credit for.
I think that you just don't care for the quantum phsyics narrative aspect. Because just simply doing a second playthorugh sheds so much light in regards to how much effort that Levine outputted into this narrative.
The Lutece conversation, the foreshadowing in the lighthouse, with the heads and tails aspect, even the music lyrics in the pop music had a lot of depth and meaning to the narrative.
It's incredibly well made simply from a foreshadowing perspective, and simply how much details were scattered throughout the narrative that gave hints to the players about what would occur, but was simply nonsense/ white noise to the player.
Plus, it's a fucking hard narrative to write and come up with. An the fact that Levine managed to include next to none plot holes is a feet in itself. Especially since the highly praised Kojima, comes up with the exact same twists, but never the bow that neatly wraps it all nicely together.
I think in that regard, saying Infinite is shallow is showing quite a bit of disrespect to Levine and the writers at Irrational for the work they put in the narrative.
But hey, it's your opinion, so I respect that.
