South Park: The Stick of Truth

The biggest joke in any South Park game released before 2014 may be the integrity of the game itself. From the Turok with turkeys first-person shooter debut to the recent platformer abomination, past South Park developers made the mistake of believing fans want to play an uninspired genre entry featuring show characters and references. With the show creators at the helm, The Stick of Truth approaches monitors and TVs with an unlikely confidence for a licensed game; one that doesn't live or die by genre restrictions. It gives fans what they want: An adventure in a world they know and love re-imagined through clever interactions and game references.

The best and worst things about The Stick of Truth are a result of its choice to be an RPG. In combat, it closely resembles Paper Mario [マリオストーリー]s low-stress tactics and button-timed attacks, but The Stick of Truth is more of an adventure game than anything. Battles exist as filler or a way to set-up and deliver a joke. In a lot of ways, it resembles the old PC adventure Quest for Glory where the RPG design was there mostly for thematic consistency and distractions from puzzle-solving. Thankfully, The Stick of Truth's battle system isn't one of frustration but simple satisfaction -- at least, for the majority of the game. By its end, it becomes increasingly clear Obsidian Entertainment never planned to offer much depth which makes the longer boss battles awkward. Even on hard, there was never a moment where I broke a sweat. The equipment and spells are so over-powered that you can easily wear armor from three character levels ago in most encounters and not face any trouble.

The best parts of game design come from avoiding combat. This may seem like a jab against the game, but its not. Obsidian realized the combat can be boring if prolonged in a section -- thus self-aware jokes from the characters about exhaustion from repetitive fights -- so they give environmental puzzles to defeat most enemies outside combat. Not only do you save time, you collect the same rewards and experience. This would be an unforgivably lazy move from Obsidian if these puzzles weren't so clever and fun to solve in themselves. It's not exactly Portal (not to mention a classic Sierra Entertainment adventure) but I was always happy to solve them -- maybe this says more about the lackluster combat. The better result would be for Obsidian to make a deeper RPG that offers increasing challenge and depth, or to fully commit to an action-puzzle adventure that made greater use of character abilities. The most important thing I can say about all this is that combat rarely gets in the way of story and, more often than not, increases enjoyment of it through contextual button prompts in unique quest battles.

You probably know by now that The Stick of Truth is funny by the generally high review scores. Comedy is always subjective and always boring to critique, so I'll just say I enjoyed the story in The Stick of Truth more than anything South Park since the glorious Bigger Longer and Uncut. The problem I have with most South Park episodes is that they drive a funny concept or joke into the ground due to episode length constraints. The Stick of Truth's quest format gives the story room to go in different directions every 20-30 minutes so no joke outstays its welcome. The story may be nostalgic to longtime South Park fans, as it pays homage to nearly every revered episode and character in the show's lengthy history. However, this also results in a story that lacks momentum or the genuine surprise of the South Park film that introduced new characters and told its own unique plot. I remained entertained and laughing throughout the game's shockingly crude scenes, which is more than I can say of most South Park episodes or games (in general).

It took me four months to complete The Stick of Truth, despite its brief playtime (for an RPG at least) -- less than 10 hours with most sidequests completed. This was entirely due to the slow start that left me cold. The open world nature of the game is leaned into a little too hard, as the opening quests task you with going to all different sides of the map. Fans of the show should find amusement in exploring the world but it lacks a strong hook to keep most RPG fans going. Once you get past the first hour, the quests offer more structure and the fast-travel system adds momentum. I still found myself flustered with how much time I spent in menus, partly due to bad UI but mostly because the abundance of equipment you find. This would be good in most RPGs, adding incentive to questing and room for character customization, but it feels like excessive filler in a game where combat means so little -- I chock it up to being the result of developer busy work during months of prolonged release delays.

Even with these stumbling blocks, Obsidian and South Park creators' love of RPGs and commitment to the genre results in a game that should delight fans of the show and crude humor. It doesn't transcend the show, entering the realm of classic RPGs, but that was never part of the plan. The game works due to its irrelevance toward the genre by making fun of the tropes it plays into while side-stepping most others. With this approach, one can almost imagine how past South Park games weren't innately terrible but simply had the wrong mindset behind them. Whoever buys this game isn't buying it for a great RPG. They are buying it for a laugh and an adventure in a world they know and love. And if its battle system is merely okay, one won't mind when the laughs and clever player interactions are so great.

Ended up being a lot of fun. I would say just for fans of the show only. The fart jokes get a bit stale after awhile. But overall it matches the tone of the show perfectly, absolutely the best tv game I can think of. If you love these characters, you'll enjoy this game. The RPG is pretty fun, like an old Newgrounds game in some ways with how the graphics are.

I played this for the sake of Achievement Hunting on Xbox as I really liked it as a teenager, but as an adult. This sucked.

To start with some pros. I felt the battle system itself was fine, it was a very bare-bone RPG system, and there wasn't anything wrong with that. The references from the show's history were very fun. The music was fine, the difficulty was fair, and I've beaten it on 4 separate occasions so I must like something about it.

The cons: The dialogue and plot were what really killed it for me when I was replaying it. South Park is crude, and I should expect that going in. I have nothing against dark, or cruel humor, but for me personally, the jokes just weren't funny. It's a lot of fart and ball jokes two guys I know can write funnier material.

I probably won't touch this game again now that I have nearly all the achievements for it, I can't bring myself to get the last few on my list.

This is peak South Park, all wrapped up into what is essentially an interactive movie. The incredible writing is absolutely top notch for any video game, let alone TV adaptations, and they also managed to fill it with fanfare.

The actual RPG elements are decent, with the best parts being the costume and weapon design. The only part I found lackluster was the combat. I didn't find it particularly challenging or interesting, and it was more of a means to get through the story for me. I do appreciate the variety of the combat though to at least keep it somewhat fresh between the different enemies and party members as well as the different types of builds you can optimize for.

Because the story was the biggest selling point for me, I don't feel particularly inclined to replay the game. With all that said though, I can definitely recommend this game to fans of the series.

While I would recommend this game, and I will list the reasons why, I need to start off with the negatives.

The save system is probably the worst I've ever seen in a big budget RPG. You can save anywhere anytime into any file you want - except you can't. You can create a new copy of your last autosave from the last checkpoint you passed, but that's it. In a later part of the game I went through a cave, killed some monsters, got some loot, saved a guy and made him and the Canadian Princess my friends, and I went back into Ottawa. Saved. Quit. Reloaded and was put back in the cave. Sure I only lost a couple of minutes worth of progress, but how stupid is this? For a game that I beat in 13 hours, I should be able to save the minutiae of my equipment changes.
Also, I beat the game in 13 hours on normal difficulty, no guides used. This is a fair length as there's no downtime in the story, there's a whole bunch of sidequests I didn't do, and there's replay value in playing as other classes. Is that enough to buy the game off sale? Your mileage may vary.
While the story had no downtime, it didn't set up the final dungeon and bosses very well. I expected the story would be the first week of New Kid's stay in South Park, maybe 5 days. As day 3 drew to a close and the game was over, it caught me off guard. I'd been thinking of other things they could've added into the game, and what the logical progression of the main story would be. So while it wrapped up nicely, there wasn't a good buildup to it.

I had some issues with the controls. I used the 360 controller setup, and I never got fully accustomed to all the uses of the triggers and right analog stick, but that's on me. More importantly, I blame the game for the problems I had with tutorials and combat. The tutorials did a bad job of informing me why what I just did wasn't what it asked me to do. Combat is worse. Sometimes the terminology is iffy - a character's melee attack comes with the instruction of "Tap A when you see the blink", and I read tap as a repeated action, not as a single press.
But melee attacks are learned quickly; they have the same blink that comes with a sound prompt that gets you to press A or X at the right moment. All abilities aren't as forgiving; they'll tell you what to do, but not give any great visual or auditory clue of when to do it. They'll tell you "too soon" or "too late", but without an on-screen prompt it's still hard to learn the timing. Still, sometimes you'll get prompts for an ability or to dodge a boss's special move - even that can suck when it expects you to mash a random button and the strict countdown begins before you can react to which button you're supposed to press.

That being said, moving on to the positives;

I really enjoyed the combat. There are some comparisons to be made to the classic pre-Wii Paper Mario games in that you have two choices of physical attacks (normal or ranged), enemies stand in lines so you can only use your normal attack on the guy in the front, and the timed button prompts of your actions significantly impact the effects of attacks.
I also enjoyed non-combat victory conditions that give me EXP. Gotta look around for not-quite-Rube Goldberg contraptions and set them up with a shot or fart to take out enemies before they can act. It almost felt a shame to pass on the opportunity to take part in the great battle system, but sometimes I just wanna save my speed potions for the boss, you know?
The graphics and voice acting are all 100% South Park, it's clear they had the people on board. Wandering around town, you can hear all sorts of music from the TV series being played over radios or whatnot.
I haven't watched South Park in years, and I didn't feel lost in any sense. I think they did a great job of retaining the identity of the show without alienating casual fans.
The amount of customization you can do with your appearance, your equipment, your abilities and perks is staggering.
The amount of sidequests that were made available to me exploring the town on day 1 were overwhelming.
Canada. Videogame jokes in a videogame that could only work in a videogame and yet be totally in line with South Park's portrayal of Canada.

To be honest, this thing coud've been a bit better as a special or something, yeah i know about that black friday trilogy, but like the only reason you'd wanna play this is the incredibly good writing, like seriously the writing completely carries this thing. I absolutely love it, but the actual combat and gameplay is pretty lackluster. You can pretty much beat every fight in this game by just hitting them hard enough (seriously (kinda)) And its pretty recycled from 90's RPGs, but eeh, maybe having yourself inside the world of south park is really crucial for this. Sure, have my 30 bucks. 7/10