(Signs the club roster indiscreetly)
I received Bioshock 2 as a gift from my older brother last week and I'd beaten it about four days ago by now. It was a good game, I got my scares out of it. Of course, its a sequel, so I think it did suffer from the fact that outdoing the first game's storyline was nigh impossible. Overall, the gameplay was far superior, much better than the last. Playing as Delta was fun (until I realized there was no New Game Plus like the last one) and I relished my later few Big Sister fights. The only time she was really scary though was the first time you really had to fight her.
I mean yeah, in concept, she was terrifying. But I think so much more could have been done with her. And with her, so much more to the storyline.
Now, when I had first heard of Bioshock 2, I had picked up a GameInformer with the image of the Big Sister on it. I thought that was a brilliant idea. I liked the idea they posed with an enemy "that could take a Big Daddy out" like it was nothing. I thought:
Wow, the Big Sister is a one-man army basically. She knows where you are, she will find you, and she will kill you as many times as it takes to put you down for the count.
And then they turned her into an "army". An army that HAS to be killed on a regular basis or else Bioshock 2 wouldn't be much of a game, or HAS to be killable. And instead of some new subplot, we get the "original Big Sister". That aggravated me, the concept of a sole Big Sister who could simply kick your ass sounded a lot better than an Army. And her ADAM needle, I figured that she would actually STEAL your collected ADAM and some EVE when she pounces on you, but she doesn't. The game was anything BUT rushed, but I wonder who in the development team overlooked these things or passed them over.
Sofia Lamb is the most irritating video game antagonist I have ever seen (okay, probably not the worst, but the worst in recent memory). She constantly makes me think that there is GOING to be some crazy twist and I was gripping every little detail on her that I could. But I felt a little betrayed with all of her "for the greater good" crap and most of her conversations in Fontaine Futuristics. I won't ruin the spoilers but nonetheless it made me want to kill her EVEN more.
I got the Good Ending. For those of you who know what that means. I couldn't help but spare every last Little Sister and person I could, I just didn't have the heart. Before it was...
It was like seeing somebody else's kid fall off a swingset and get up. You say to yourself "Its not my kid" when the mom or dad runs over, you move along. When Jack killed a Big Daddy, the "harvesting" was easy to do (somewhat). Now that they trust you and all, with their cute comments on the kills Delta makes, its just horrible. What does she say if you harvest her?
"Daddy! No! No!"
The child is even SELF-AWARE of her fate. She knows what her chemically-attached FATHER plans to do to her, and its just awful for me.
Anyways, back to Lamb. I look at it this way. Ryan BUILT a city, a metropolis, an awesome masterpiece with so many different facets and workings. He may have died, but there was a reason he was STATIONED at Rapture Central Control. A reason why HE was Hephaestus and Sofia Enohpesre. Sofia merely took everything Ryan had and played the fiddler to an army of mutant, gene spliced-up rodents. I don't like her because she keeps pumping her BS philosophy through the vents of Rapture, ironic as Ryan instead pumped ADAM through those same vents 10 years ago.
And her comments about why she deals with the the protagonist the way she does are so full of crap I relished the chance just to see her drown - I asked myself so many questions from the beginning of the game.
What's her fight going to be like? Is she going to willingly let us kill her like Ryan did? How's her broke-ass face going to look when she's dead?
Maybe all of this is just a part of her character intentionally. All I know is, despite being an asshole for the entire game, I had some MODERATE respect for Andrew Ryan. Sofia Lamb, however, makes me hope that neither she nor the "Rapture Family" ever appear ever again. In fact if there is a third Bioshock game, I don't want to see any trace of her presence ever again. No audio diaries, no scribbles on the walls, nothing. She deserves no references or remembrance.