Bioshock Final (Joseph)

IT IS OVER! This story that we have been following has been concluded. And the conclusion S-U-C-K-E-D, SUCKED. I have soooo many problems with this section, but, let’s start at the beginning. We start this part with Elizabeth being captured, again. Nice to see songbird back again though. After she is taken away we walk through a wall of snow, and time… somehow? Anyways, we end up in the future, with the most annoying enemies in the game. I hate the stupid mask-wearing guys, if only because they made me spend the energy to go into my menu and change my equipment loadout into a melee-oriented one. In terms of lore, I did like how this part was in a “rehabilitation” center, which added to the air of creepiness; I really did get some chills roaming around the facility, with no ammo. My time there was spent at roughly 3/4 health meleeing people to death, desperately hoping for health, ammo, and salts. During the ordeal, I found many recordings of Elizebeth, an Elizebeth. By looking at the dates and listening, I could tell that we had been moved into the future… somehow. At the end, we meet Old Elizebeth, who is missing the pendant that we gave her. She is overseeing the end of America- the vision we had at the beginning of the game, but she is not happy. She gives us a piece of paper with instructions on how to avoid this timeline, which opens up sooo many time paradoxes that my head starts to hurt. After coming back to the present, we have to rescue Elizabeth from a science experiment which looks like a scaled up version of what we saw when we entered her tower in universe 1. Next, we have to (and this is such an original idea) take over Comstock’s airship. I had much more fun during this part. From the conversation we heard at the binging (“Booker, are you afraid…”), to shoving people off their airships with the octopus vigor, to the actual storming of the airship- mainly due to the fact that I HAD AMMO AND SALT. As you can tell, I don’t like it when games take away my stuff. After finding Comstock, in a Garden of Eden-esque place no less, Booker kills him after Comstock starts talking about Elizebeth’s pinky. While this seems like a very large overreaction, it is explained in a bit. Before that, however, we have the final battle, which I will sum up my feelings for as follows: JHB^RKLKJCGVBC@WKNRFJIOWIHCJGLCHKGBNSLDFKNBHLJE!KW$NLDI257GASUOBESO@IHGI4U34YHFJNA?LHVB CVNSGT4HI@JWHYUG23EWIGGYGIOHJNF4#LOHUTKIO56HTY0289HWJS)VN SLPIHN*ALDPHONHBG1IYUO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I don’t like it. If there is someone who does like it, they should be admitted to the insane asylum from earlier. After destroying the tower, which isn’t half crumbled in this universe, Elizebeth gains all of her powers and takes us on a journey. It starts out fine- I like to see the reference to Rapture (Bioshock 1 and 2). And using the lighthouses to represent the infinite universes is a nice touch. Unfourtanlity, it’s hard to appreciate it due to the UNYIELDING RAGE that the ending brings. My main problem(and trust me, I have a lot) is that the ending is not internally consistent with the rules established in-universe. How can Booker become a past version of himself? That spans the multiverse… somehow? How do the Elizebeth’s drown him and don’t create infinite grandfather paradoxes? Or do they and we see the multiverse collapsing? How do the Luteces pull Booker, but he loses his memories? What is the last bit with Booker, how does it work? There are so many questions that aren’t answered in any way. The ending taints my experience of the rest of the game. I thought it was building to… I don’t know, but SOMETHING, not this. I still feel like it was worth playing, but the ending leaves A LOT to be desired.

3 Responses

  1. Ahsan Ahmad says:

    While I don’t share all of your rage towards the ending’s confusion, I do share some of the disapproval. The final airship game play was painful enough but then the ending left so many questions about what happens to all the paradoxes and what about the possibility of a Booker-never-drowns universe. It kind of deprives the plot of closure but I don’t think even they could come up with a clear solution to the whole problem since they decided to take on the gargantuan multiverse concept. Even if you eradicate all the universes where Booker existed at all…there’s still the universes where the eradication never happens. Confusing stuff.

  2. James Bachmann says:

    The game hurts your brain. I think the people making this game were starting to lose track of where they were going because of how mind-trippy multidimensions are, especially mixed in with staggered timelines. So another guess of mine is that the end is so convoluted because the writers themselves did not know how to fill all the holes they dug for themselves. Taking the game at face value, I still enjoyed the game personally, as long as you stop yourself from going down the rabbit hole of trying to make sense out of something that is totally theoretical and written by people who are not theoretical physicists.

  3. Jaclyn Kemly says:

    I agree that playing through some parts of the ending were pretty brutal (i died a lot….). And I agree about the ending for the most part. I don’t understand how if Elizabeth only killed one Booker, this erases the all of the Bookers/Comstocks. I don’t exactly think the ending tainted the rest of my experience playing the game, but I do agree that all of the unanswered questions are a bit frustrating.