Paul’s Top 10: Red Dead Redemption 2
Written by Paul Lehman
*Please note that this article is related to Paul’s thoughts on the game belonging in his top 10 games of all time. Click here to see the post regarding the deep dive episode done on Red Dead Redemption 2.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is the ultimate escapist gamer’s dream. You get to step into the shoes of Arthur Morgan and experience the world as a cowboy in 1899. I actually played the original game in the series, Red Dead Revolver, when it first released on Xbox, although it’s only loosely related to the Redemption games. I’m a sucker for cowboy games, so I always bought all of them when they came out. The Red Deads, Gun, Call of Juarez, Evil West, you name it. Red Dead Redemption 1 was a game that I cherished in 2010, and it was hard to imagine that there would ever be a better Western themed game. I loved the emotional plight of John Marston, an outlaw cowboy forced by the Bureau of Investigation to hunt down his former friends in the van der Linde gang.
Then 2018 dropped Red Dead Redemption 2, which served as a prequel to the first Redemption. We meet Arthur Morgan, my all time favorite protagonist. He’s grumpy, stubborn, and ruthless. I struggled with Arthur at first. He doesn’t respect John Marston, the character that I had fallen in love in the previous game, and I wasn’t so sure I was going to jive with him as I played the early missions.
Slowly over time, you get to see Arthur transform into a new man. You are sent to go out on a mission to collect money from a man who borrowed from the gang. He can’t pay, so you beat him. Badly. The man violently coughs up blood which spatters on Arthur’s face. In the moment, I didn’t realize how much weight this moment would hold. Over the course of several missions, I started to notice that Arthur’s eye were turning a tinge of yellow. He would start to cough at random times. Eventually things get so bad that he starts to black out from the incessant coughs. You finally see a doctor and learn that you have tuberculosis. This is 1899, a world without antibiotics, so it’s a death sentence.
The gruff exterior of Arthur starts to erode and you realize that there’s a sensitive self-reflective man underneath. Arthur often writes in his journal and sketches pictures of people and landscapes that he runs across. We get to read letters sent back and forth between him and his lost love. It starts to dawn on Arthur that the gang’s actions have actually become counter-productive and he makes it his mission to save John from this life that they have found themselves in. Arthur encourages John to be a better father to Jack and to be there for his wife Abigail. The Arthur that we know at the end of the game isn’t the one we knew at the beginning, and it’s just so tragic that Arthur finally finds his true self right at the end of his life. His impending death feels like a 100-pound stone on your chest, and you hope that by some miracle Arthur will survive. Toward the end of the game, Arthur tells John to run to safety while he stays behind to provide cover. Arthur puts his hat on John’s head and they share a sweet moment where John says, “You’re my brother” and Arthur replies in his best Han Solo impression, “I know, I know.”
When Arthur eventually succumbs to death on the top of that mountain at the hands of Micah, I was surprised at how moved I was. The loss hit me like a ton of bricks and it was hard to shake. To lose Arthur was difficult, and the fact that it was at the hands of Micah, one of the most infuriating villains ever created, actually made me mad. The epilogue with John, while much slower than the rest of the game, was sorely needed because there was no way the game could end with Arthur’s death. We had to end on some kind of high note, and getting to see John do his best to provide for his family in a legal way in order to honor Arthur’s sacrifices for him felt earned and rewarding. However, there was still the problem of Micah.
John learns about Micah’s whereabouts, and we get the gratification of settling the score with him. This is the man that betrayed and sold out the gang. He put everyone in danger multiple times and is not a benevolent outlaw. He is a psychopath who enjoys hurting others, and he enjoyed playing a role in Arthur’s death. Luckily Rockstar knew that we needed the satisfaction of activating Dead Eye one last time to turn him into a pincushion.
In addition to the incredible writing and storytelling, the gameplay is fantastic. Probably the most common criticisms of the game revolve around the gun shooting mechanics, but I find them to be more than serviceable. I love cover-based third-person shooters, and I enjoyed unlocking and using the selection of weapons. Not to mention the creativity you can exhibit, like using your lasso to tie up a villain and let them be eaten by a gator or find their demise on the train tracks. You can fish, go hunting, play poker, take bounties, go on heists, rob merchants, engage in duals, and find collectibles. I’ve often said that if I had to pick only one game to play from this point forward on a desert island with no internet connection, I think this would be it. There’s just so much to do, and so much to experience. The attention to detail is second to none (don’t forget…even horse testicles react to the temperature in this game). There are few single-player games that I have spent 100 hours in, but this is one of them, and easily belongs on my top 10 games of all time.