Bully

Bully is a great game. The story is fun, the soundtrack is perfectly fitting, the characters are entertaining and unique, the factions are enjoyable, the missions are all very entertaining too, the combat is serviceable, and the general systems of the world (with jobs and the authority system especially) are great and really immerse you in.

But this game is dragged down by one GIANT thing: the reputation system. In short, it does not matter.

Reputation as a concept is pretty common in a lot of games today; but in 2006, it was pretty impressive. Faction reputation is usually based off of how you treat the members of a faction; whether it’s positive or negative, how you treat them is usually the basis.

In Bully, it’s based off missions and nothing else. You literally cannot do anything to change faction reputation EXCEPT play through the story; so reputation is literally not decided by you. You are incapable of doing anything to change it on your own, and that is insane to me. You can’t align yourself with any of the factions, you can’t pick a side or have a bone to pick with a different group. You HAVE to end up with a certain reputation by the end of certain parts of the story. For the way the plot is set up, it works, but I wish it could be different. It’s so insanely frustrating to me.

Um favorito da infância. Uma esculhambação juvenil que provocou a ira de governos mundo afora. Só por isso já é legal pra cacete.

Seu humor, porém, não envelheceu legal e o universo é bem menos expansivo do que eu lembrava.

É bom relembrar esse período em que a Rockstar era uma empresa corajosa e capaz de criar algo com tanta personalidade quanto Bully.

If you said to critics and said "Rockstar will make a perfect high school game" they will laugh at you.

The story is so simple but very intresting. Quite disappointing that they don't curse in this game but okay.

Bully actually brings back some memories for me, I got the game on sale for like $1 on a PSN Rockstar game sale. So near the end of my final year of college, on a Friday night I brought my PS3 to the lobby of the dorm my friends would gather and we played this a little bit later in the night. We played through the first few missions and actually had some fun. I played it a little bit more a few times later in the week. Then after I graduated I continued it at home, making it the first game I played after college. Its sort of a unique game where most of the game is set in a school and you have to go to classes and complete mini games, while most of the side and main quests consist of doing various activities for the schools factions, which consist of stereotypical school groups like the nerds, the jocks, the greasers, etc. At the same time you have to stay low key and not get expelled. It has some decent humor thrown in that I even consider to at times surpass that of GTA humor, which is sort of hit or miss. The story is solid, the characters are pretty memorable, and the game doesn't drag out too long. But of course like any Rockstar game you do get occasional bugs, the combat is pretty awful, and the character models are kind of ugly looking. But I can forgive these with a solid story, good humor, interesting missions, and variety. It might not be a top Rockstar game, but it sure is a solid one, and the music at times reminds of Napoleon Dynamite for some reason.

A fun but low-jey jaunt through an adolescent GTA, Bully is helped by having a lot of intertwining systems and variations on the same basic gameplay, with a frankly excellent ticking clock system, but like many open-world games, this variety is a thin disguise for the basic mechanics not being as up to snuff as a specialised genre title. Light and breezy enough to be enjoyable, with enough bite to satisfy over a bored weekend, but not really worth coming back to in the same way as the best GTAs.