L.A. Noire: Saying Goodbye

Warning: Major spoilers for the ending of L.A. Noire.

Yes, the flamethrowers were ridiculous. Yes, the switch to gunplay in the final mission feels like it betrays a lack of confidence in the game’s core mechanics. The thing that bothered me, though–the thing that left me feeling faintly unsatisfied after completing what is on the whole an excellent game–was the way the ending handles the two player characters.

So, L.A. Noire turned out to more story-arc-based than I had thought when I was half way through it. The Traffic cases are self-contained; the Homicide cases at first seem self-contained but turn out to have their own arc; but the Vice and Arson desks, the entire second half of the game, tell an increasingly unified story, until by the end of the game the breaks between the missions begin to feel arbitrary.

Towards the end, the game introduces a second player character, Kelso. I didn’t mind the switch in itself–I enjoyed the Kelso missions, and the change itself gave a sense that things were changing because we were moving into the endgame. What I was expecting was to play as Kelso for a few missions, have him deliver the final evidence that Phelps needed, and then switch back to Phelphs for the climax. The overall arc of the game had been about Phelps’s gradual rise in the police force, then his fall, just as he was on the verge of uncovering major corruption. I expected a final act to that story, in which Phelps survives his darkest hour and rises triumphant. Even if it were at great personal cost, I expected to see Phelps win.

Instead, the baton passes to Kelso and Phelps is sidelined. There are a few more Phelps missions, but they seem half-hearted. You investigate a crime scene in which you already saw in a cutscene what happened.

There is one excellent playable sequence as Phelps, where he escorts Kelso’s car to the scene of the endgame as the rest of the police force hunts for him. They get there, and then they say they’ll split up: Kelso will go one way into the storm drains, and Phelps will go in another way, and they’ll meet in the middle. I find myself playing Kelso, but I assume that I’ll be playing one sequence as each of them. Two heroes, both player characters, working together in the endgame–great stuff.

But I don’t get my final Phelps sequence. I make it to the middle of the storm drain as Kelso, and then Phelps arrives, having made his own way without my help–any adventures he had, I don’t get to see. And then, unexpectedly, that’s it. In a final cutscene, Phelps is killed, in twist of fate only barely related to the plot up to that point. The final cutscene is Kelso attending Phelps’s funeral.

I don’t object to the main character dying, but I felt like I hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye. The last car chase mission was great, but nothing about it flagged to me that it would be the last Phelps mission. I wanted Phelps to be the main character of the endgame as he was of most of the game, or at least for him to be joint main character with Kelso. You could imagine a great final mission in which you guide Phelps as he goes knowingly to his death, for some tragically inevitable Film Noir reason. Instead he dies suddenly, in a cutscene, as a supporting character in someone else’s story.

To be clear, I like Kelso, and I would happily play a L.A. Noire 2 in which he was the main character–but he wasn’t the main character of this game and it shouldn’t have ended as if he was. I also very much liked the game over all, and this is just a criticism of one aspect of it.

L.A. Noire: Interactive short stories vs interactive novels

I’m very much enjoying L.A. Noire at the moment, and one of the most interesting things for me is the way the game structures its story.  Most story-focused games are like novels or movies in that the game has a single main story. The game might be divided into chapters or missions, but these function like the chapters in a novel, each one adding dramatic beats to the main story rather than standing alone.

Playing L.A. Noire, it struck me that the game felt like a collection of linked short stories rather than like a novel. (Or, if you prefer, like an episodic TV series rather than like a movie.) Each case is a self-contained story, with its own cast of characters and its own beginning, middle, and ending.

I think that this short-story-like approach might be a better way of structuring non-linear, story-based games than the more common novelistic approach. Developers can give the player plenty of different paths to take through the story without it getting unwieldy, because the branches will all be cut and the player put back in place at the start of the next mission.

It also makes the prospect of replaying the mission and making different choices more attractive. Each case is short enough to easily play through in one sitting (again like a short story as opposed to a novel), so I’m not put off by the length of time it would take to replay them. I don’t have to invest multiple sessions playing from the start in order to make a different choice half way through the game.

L.A. Noire’s missions aren’t actually as self-contained as they first appear. There is an overarching story (I’m only half way through, but it’s not hard to see where it’s going), and there are story arcs covering smaller groups of missions. Still, it feels like a collection of short stories with a plot thread running through them, or like a TV series with a myth arc running through mostly stand-alone episodes, rather than like a novel or film. The distinction between games with self-contained missions and those with single overall stories is a sliding scale, but L.A. Noire comes in closer to the short story end of the scale than any other game I’ve played recently.

Thinking about it, it would be possible for a game to go much further towards the short story end than L.A. Noire has. A game could be a compilation of stories, built on the same game engine and with the same game mechanics, but each with its own self-contained story, with its own main character and perhaps its own setting. (It might be easier on the graphics budget for them to all take place in the same city and time period.) The stories could be linked by theme rather than being part of the same plot. The player basically gets a compilation of small games, but doesn’t have to learn new game mechanics each time, so can focus on them as interactive stories.

That sort of game could lend itself to storytelling possibilities that aren’t being explored in many current games, just as short stories are a different sort of beast from novels. The question would be whether there would be a market for short-story-anthology games. I think there would, but a limited one, and the games would probably have to ride on the coat-tails of more conventional story-based games from the same studio. (To stretch my analogy further, there’s also a smaller market for short stories than for novels, and an author isn’t likely to get a short story anthology published until they’ve had a few novel sales first.)

I’ll see how many self-contained stories there are in the second half of L.A. Noire, and here’s hoping that other games explore the short story model in future.