Bully

Was rather disappointed with this in the end. Initially, it my impression was that Rockstar would actually try to tell a story about a genuine human experience and the feelings associated with it - mixed with some occasional hijinks. Later on, the silliness got out of hand without the game's humoristic qualities profiting from it, and the story just became about a struggle for control of the school driven by unlikable and inauthentic characters.

Rockstar may have become an upsetting behemoth over the past 10 years or so, but it's funny to think that there was a time when they could put out a game like this and be accused of creating a "racial violence simulator" without including anything as overtly edgy as Trevor Phillips or interactive torture. Was it not just way more satisfying to troll people with stuff that explicitly *isn't* any more adult or offensive than causing a few skinned knees and wedgied crotches?

It might seem derisive to describe Bully as GTA San Andreas but in a school, and there are reasons why Bully *is* so much more than that. But the prospect of Rockstar taking the best GTA game, trimming some of the excess bloat off and transposing it into another setting setting is one that I wish the studio had pursued more. I guess technically it's what they did with Red Dead, but... nah, that game is exactly how to do that wrong.

One of the best things about Bully is that it's small-scale. Firstly, it's short in terms of playtime - if you're not speed running it and not shooting for 100% completion, there's a good ten hours of content on a first playthrough, which was and still should be perfectly respectable. Secondly, it's a less sprawling, tighter sandbox, with plenty to do but with a pretty strong focus on doing the campaign.

But what I think really benefits it is the bedtime mechanic. It's a simple thing really, but the fact that each in-game day ends with you going to bed - either intentionally or because you pass out around 2am - there's a real feeling of coziness to it all. It's not a life simulator, it's a fun little game about school hijinks, and this mechanic really limits your ability to wander around boring yourself, which would in turn create the temptation for the devs to cram the game with stuff to do during that wandering. Bully hems you in in the best way, by making sure you never forget that it's all about school.

The setting of Bulworth Academy, a pretty faithful recreation of a private boarding school, works to counter one of the things I never liked much about crime-focused sandbox games. The pettiness and pride of factions might be very true to the world of criminal gangs, but it was always kind of alienating to me, as an achingly middle-class bean who just wants everyone to get along and smooch already. Because Bully's factions are made up of cliques of teenage schoolkids, that pettiness is far more relatable, and can actually be presented as being as absurd as it really is. And everyone do be smooching.

Oh yeah, and you can heal yourself by smooching boys, or girls if you're into that; and it's honestly weird to me that *that* wasn't what got the right-wing upset about this game.

Storywise, the game is a little predictable, with the protagonist doing questlines for each major faction. And if I have a criticism, it's how linear that progression is. Faction affinity is presented as a percentage in the menu, but as far as I can tell, it's just a case of one faction's affinity going up, then the next one, then the next one - and then they all go down, which was kinda cool. I get why it's like that; the game itself is pretty linear, which each chapter corresponding to a faction and a season, meaning that the whole environment will change at set points. Optional missions can presumably be missed, but I don't think I ever missed any so I can only guess. Still, it feels like maybe there was an idea to have the player able to annoy or ingratiate themselves to factions in smaller ways outside the main story. Maybe this was sacrificed in the name of a tighter story campaign, and if that's the case, we probably ended up with a stronger game as a result.

Bully stands alongside Saints Row 2, in my opinion, as a game for people who liked what GTA was but weren't really onboard for what it became. It's a game that understands that, while half of the audience for San Andreas was there for the gritty realism and role-play, the other half were there for the profound silliness of it all. And I guess they reached a point where they couldn't really fit both into one game. I do recommend Bully to anyone who hasn't tried it, although god knows how you'd play it these days. It might not blow anyone's mind, but it's the last purely enjoyable Rockstar game that exists purely to be enjoyed.

But it stands above Max Payne and LA Noire―yuck. This is the original Hogwarts Legacy.

Rockstar Games ranked (the ones I've played):

GTA 4 (classic)
RDR2 (classic)
Bully (great)
GTA San Andreas (great)
GTA 5 (good)
GTA Vice City (good)
Max Payne 1 (good)
Max Payne 2 (good - average)
Max Payne 3 (mediocre)
GTA 3 (awful - outdated)
LA Noire (awful)

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.