Dishonored 2 (2016)
Basic Summary: A deposed Empress or her father fight to reclaim their empire from the hands of a sinister coven.
Genre: Stealth-Action
Systems: PC, PS4, Xbox One
Created by: Arkane Studios
Directed by: Harvey Smith
Written by: Sandra Duval, Terri Brosius, Austin Grossman
Designed and Programmed by: Dinga Bakaba, Hugues Tardif
Starring: Stephen Russell, Erica Luttrell, Vincent D'Onofrio, Rosario Dawson, Robin Lord Taylor
Story-Gameplay Ratio: 5:5
For the unaware, Dishonored 2 follows Emily Kaldwin and Corvo Attano, respectively the Empress of the Isles and her father / Royal Protector. Fifteen years after the assassination of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin and Corvo's bloody vengeance on the conspirators responsible, Dunwall is once again facing a crisis: a brutal serial killer dubbed the "Crown Killer" is eliminating Emily's political rivals and framing the crime scenes to appear as if she and Corvo are responsible, which is causing tension to build throughout the empire. Emily and Corvo resolve to track down the culprit, but when the anniversary of Jessamine's death hits, they find themselves suddenly cast down from power and framed for the murders by the all-powerful witch Delilah and her helper, the Duke of neighboring isle Serkonos. With one of the rightful rulers sealed away in stone, the other escapes Dunwall and sets sail for Serkonos's southern port of Karnaca, where the Duke reigns supreme and Delilah's plot began. It's up to them and them alone to claw their way back up from nothing, bring this new conspiracy down, and reclaim the throne before Delilah brings the empire to ruin...
Spoiler: show
The original Dishonored is one of my all-time favorite games -- if not my absolute favorite, then definitely in my top five. It's such an astounding title, boasting a bleak and gripping story taking place in a superbly developed and well-realized world, as well as tight stealth gameplay rivaling the genre's best and a devotion to letting you pick any number of different approaches and playstyles to accomplish your goals. I've played it more times than I can count since its release in 2012, and I still find new things to appreciate within its richly detailed and secret-filled missions. So when the sequel was announced last year, I was absolutely elated, and it easily became my most anticipated release of 2016 even as I fought to keep my expectations in check. Now the game is out, and I've completed High and Low Chaos runs with both characters, so I can finally talk about it. Does it live up to the first game's lofty standards, or is it doomed to sink into the grimy seas and be torn apart by hagfish?
Strap in, 'cause I've got a lot to say.
We'll go with the best stuff first, so we begin with the gameplay. As I've said, Dishonored was no slouch in the gameplay department, so it would take quite a lot of work to improve meaningfully upon it. Fortunately, that's exactly what Dishonored 2 does. The core systems of sneaking around and taking out your enemies remain in place, but numerous updates and additions have been made across the board to tighten up an already fantastic experience. The addition of combat choking, knockouts from above, and assorted non-lethal weaponry makes pursuing a Low Chaos run simpler and more gratifying (which is good, because as I'll establish, Low Chaos is the preferred option in this game). Improvements to the HUD and in-game display elements make the detection system, kill/spare mechanics, and rune hunting much less aggravating, most notably giving you the ability to lock specific runes and bone charms in basic gameplay so you don't have to constantly walk around with the Heart out. Corvo's returning powers from the previous game are mostly either preserved or improved (I say "mostly" because Bend Time has gotten a lot shittier and less effective for some reason), but Emily's new abilities like Domino and Shadow Walk steal the show by being so useful and fun to use. Finally, the divisive Chaos system is much more forgiving; you can waste a few dozen guards without getting a severe penalty, and individual targets have different moral standings that make it either immoral or completely fine to murder them.
The missions are also dramatically tightened up from a gameplay standpoint. The original game had the unforgettable "Lady Boyle's Last Party" and a few other fun change-ups, but it was otherwise pretty much straight stealth with few variations on your goals -- the variety came from how many approaches you could take to solving the problems within these environments. The sequel ramps things up another few degrees, delivering some insanely fun missions with impressive variety to them. The obvious standouts are the prominently-touted "The Clockwork Mansion" (which has you sneaking around and shifting the rooms of a labyrinthine mansion infested with fearsome clockwork sentinels) and "A Crack In The Slab" (whose gimmick is so unexpected and stunning that I won't spoil it), but a few of the other levels presented as straightforward stealth missions wind up having some kind of twist or added complication that makes them all the more fun. The final mission is a bit of a blue-baller, but I'll get to the many failings of the endgame soon.
The final main gameplay change is that supplies are much scarcer, which has an even bigger impact than you'd think. The original game let you restock and purchase upgrades at Piero's workshop before every mission, but the boat that serves as your hub in this one doesn't have a store and comes with very few supplies of its own, forcing you to scavenge environments more thoroughly and make every little pickup count. The store is replaced by black market shops you can track down in alleyways and abandoned storefronts, but their supplies vary, their prices are frequently jacked up, and the shopkeepers can be scared away or killed accidentally. The game does give you opportunities to rob each shop by various means, but doing so prevents you from using that shop again and may lead to other criminals attempting robberies. I appreciated the feeling of desperately surviving and managing which resources I might need for the missions ahead, even if I do miss Piero and the original hub structure.
Moving on, the game's visuals are another area of significant improvement. The original's painterly art style and distinctively unrealistic character models are preserved through the platform shift, yet the graphical fidelity shoots way up -- things are no more realistic than last time, but they look even better within their world. Karnaca is as much a beautifully realized location as Dunwall before it, with an instantly memorable aesthetic and numerous flourishes from the tiniest texture to the distant skybox that make this whole world feel like a place people actually work and live in -- and that's just the way the world is built up visually, to say nothing of the rich lore and environmental interactions. Sadly, the music is not on the same level: many of the original's memorably eerie piano-and-string tunes are gone with nothing but awkward silence to replace them, and the rousing, cathartic piece that played over the original's credits is merely followed up with a random street song that doesn't bring anything to a close, tie into any themes, or sound particularly wonderful on its own.
Now let's focus on some characters. In the original game, Corvo Attano was silent and something of a cipher, but he managed to rise above a lot of silent protagonists with little flashes of personality in his dialogue choices and body language (and the High Chaos finale in particular made him just as compelling as if he'd been voiced). We're not talking about the new DOOM's levels of voiceless personality, but there was something nice there that made him work. Now played by Stephen Russell, I have mixed feelings about him. His weary, depressed personality shines throughout the campaign if you choose him, and his lamentations about how hard he's still taking Jessamine's death even though he brought all of the conspirators to justice feel like natural extensions of his character in the first game. However, Russell's vocal performance comes off just a few degrees too gruff and thuggish for my taste (even if it does fit Corvo's age), and his emotional range isn't going to blow any minds. He does get a few fun bits of dialogue in Karnaca, especially in the district where he grew up (look hard enough, and you might even find his childhood home), as well as an amusing exchange with the Outsider at the start; that's mostly it, though.
This is Emily's story through and through, to the point that it's no wonder Corvo's route feels kind of underdeveloped. The developers clearly intend for you to play through the game the first time with Emily -- the narrative beats work fine enough for Corvo, but it feels more right with her, and everything from the setup of the optional tutorial to her narration in the prologue signals that this is her game. Her demeanor at the beginning and what you're told of her fifteen-year reign easily fit with the little girl you spent so much time protecting in the original, and her progression into either a pragmatic saboteur or a ruthless assassin makes some level of sense even if the plot is too undercooked to make it feel completely natural. Erica Luttrell's performance is great, and her range helps her sell most of the important beats. Not to mention that her powers are ultimately much more fun to use in this setting than Corvo's.
Unfortunately, while Corvo and Emily's bond was one of the driving elements of the original game, the interaction between the two of them is almost nonexistent thanks to Delilah freezing whomever you don't choose to play as in the opening cutscene. You don't see the frozen character again until the very end of the game -- and by "very end," I literally mean the last ten seconds. They had a great opportunity with two voiced characters, but they wasted it. The most interaction Emily gets with her father is in the surprisingly heartwarming optional tutorial, which sees him training her to fend for herself on the streets of Dunwall. Could've had something there, even if it was something as simple as being able to talk to the other character bedridden in the hub boat.
The Outsider was a critical part of giving the original game its ominous, off-kilter feeling, in no small part thanks to how powerfully eerie Billy Lush's performance was, and how it contributed to his characterization as a curious god pushing "interesting" dominos in the world to see where everything falls. Well, that Outsider is not here, and it's not just because Billy Lush got screwed over by Arkane for no reason (they didn't tell him he wouldn't reprise the role even after they brought him in to narrate the trailer!). Robin Lord Taylor does... fine, but he neither reaches Lush's iconic heights nor channels his own talents that make his Oswald Cobblepot one of the few enjoyable characters on Gotham. He's just kind of there. It might be fine if his characterization stayed the same, but this Outsider is openly more helpful, friendlier and less objective about observing where the pieces fall; he even reveals where he came from. There are plot-related reasons for this shift (albeit poor ones, since they revolve around Delilah), and much of his dialogue is at least written in the same tone as the original, but it still feels wrong.
Finally, the villains. Main villainess Delilah Copperspoon was the central antagonist of the original game's two-part Daud DLC The Knife of Dunwall / The Brigmore Witches, and while I didn't really care for or feel threatened by her, she was a serviceable side villain who worked well within the conceit of Daud's story. I had heard that Arkane decided to bring her back for the sequel because they came up with a story worth telling for her and wanted to spend more time making her a cooler character. Everybody chant it with me: You fucked up! You fucked up! You fucked up! Yeah, I'm curious to know what the supposed "story worth telling" was, because none of that is in here. Her performance is just as flatly hammy as it was previously, and she's still characterized as an insanely entitled bitch who thinks she deserves Emily's throne. An attempt is made around the halfway point to make her a sympathetic villain, but the way it's handled and the ultimately generic content of her backstory make everything fall flat even for how intriguing these story beats could be on paper. She doesn't provoke any personal ire, and the fact that she's on the opposite side of the Isles until the last mission makes her seem too distant. Literally everyone -- including the Outsider, who is functionally God -- hypes her up as an impossibly cunning and ruthless threat, but with nothing to back that up, it feels more like the creators shilling a Mary Sue than the building of suspense. She truly is one of the game's weakest links, and things would have been better tenfold had she not been brought back.
Some of the other prominent villains thankfully pick up the slack, at least for the most part. Luca Abele, the Duke of Serkonos, takes a few missions to make more of an impression than "evil tropical dictator archetype"; however, once his characterization kicks in, he steals the show so well that his lacking presence in the game is another huge flaw. Unlike every other antagonist in the series, he makes no pretensions about being a good or deserving ruler; he's a hedonistic, hard-partying manchild who has no justification for his actions and makes nonsensical intercom speeches that sometimes end with "Duke out!" Vincent D'Onofrio gives it his all and makes a damn fine impression; I just wanted so much more out of him than what I got. Also impressing is genius inventor Kirin Jindosh, the owner of the Clockwork Mansion and creator of the Clockwork Soldier enemies -- he only sticks around for a single chapter, but his Riddler / Jigsaw-esque taunting, casually cruel demeanor, and importance to the world give him an edge that makes the already brilliant level even more investing, and it's so fun to finally give him his comeuppance.
The Crown Killer... is less enjoyable. I love the Dishonored world, I love serial killer characters and stories about them, and I loved fighting supernaturally empowered characters in the first game -- the Crown Killer should have been the money shot for me. Hell, you could write the entire plot around the concept of Emily's reign being threatened by a sinister, Outsider-marked killer and the steps taken to track them down. Tragically, though, this promising killer is completely wasted to the point that the very inclusion of this plot element in the game is inconsequential. Her pictured design is fearsome and her murders are sufficiently brutal, but she's tracked down far too early, her identity is obvious from the mission briefing alone, and the confrontation with her is flaccid and unsatisfying even if you deliberately try to drag it out and let her have a fighting chance (to say nothing of how dumb and effortless the Low Chaos solution is). The reasoning behind her existence in the story is questionable at best, and her motives are practically null and void. I wouldn't be so bitter over this if the setup wasn't so promising and made out to be more meaningful than it turns out to be.
And that's as good a transition as any to Dishonored 2's most glaring drawback: the story. It starts off with a rushed coup supported on flimsy reasoning that we're supposed to believe the whole empire bought into, and your character is shuttled off to Karnaca in even less time than it took for Corvo to break out of prison. Even for how well developed Karnaca is, the journey there feels too short even though it's supposed to take place over about a month's time, and the stakes in the city don't feel as high or as bleak as they did in the first game. In fact, the whole conflict lacks a lot in the way of stakes; getting deposed by Delilah feels less like being completely screwed over and more like being faced with a mildly problematic roadblock, and despite the hand-to-mouth supply scavenging and tighter living quarters, you never really feel desperate. The missions may be extremely fun to play, but only a few are made to feel like they have any meaningful impact on how the city operates, and only the last three missions before returning to Dunwall feel like they change the city in any way. It's all distant, vague, and seriously undercooked; the coup by normal humans felt more threatening and difficult to overcome than the takeover by a godlike witch. And while a High Chaos route slowly transforms your character into a bloodthirsty avatar of vengeance, the process doesn't feel nearly as logical as the first game's events made it feel.
Which brings us to the finale, and how badly the game drops the ball here. The final mission in Dishonored changed drastically depending on your Chaos level, with the High Chaos variation and the poetic confrontations contained within it forming one of my favorite endgame scenarios in any game. In this game, you need Low Chaos to get anything out of it -- not because the final mission changes in any way (it remains exactly the same on High or Low Chaos, and exactly as disappointing), but because a critical piece of information that makes one of your main allies relevant to the story is completely withheld from you on High Chaos, making the severing of ties with your allies before the final mission feel hollow and forgettable. The actual content of the mission starts off satisfyingly eerie and atmospheric, but it quickly loses steam as you're pitted against the irritating witches in a version of Dunwall Tower filled with reused assets from the first game. It's both frustratingly quick and goes on longer than it needs to with an artificial roadblock, but at least Delilah's godlike power should make for a satisfying confrontation, right? Nope. The Low Chaos option to deal with her is literally rehashed from the DLC, and battling her straight-on takes about half a minute if you do it right and is weirdly impersonal and silent after so many attempts to build a personal rivalry between the two of you. Then comes the ending, which is just a music-less slideshow narrated by the Outsider that's structured bizarrely and ends anticlimactically. There's actually a sequel hook on Low Chaos, but it sets up a plot I'm not even sure I want.
So the plot's a wash, but that's not the last problem I have. I could talk about how I wish they'd focused more on making a sequel to Dishonored than making a sequel to the DLCs, and I could moan about how badly I wish they hadn't ostracized High Chaos players of both the vanilla game and the DLCs. But instead, what I want to end on is the lack of ambiguity, which is a bigger problem than you might think. Part of Dishonored's mystique was how much of its world was left unexplained, and how many story elements were left to implication and interpretation. Corvo was a figure of mystery whose past was speculated on by a number of people. The Outsider's past was hinted at in supplementary materials, but his exact nature was never confirmed in-game, and the nature of his Void was left as an open, Lovecraftian question. Things like Corvo being Emily's illegitimate father and the Heart containing a fragment of Jessamine's soul were strongly implied, but none of it was outright part of the story. It all came together to give the feeling of a snapshot, a window into a much larger world full of mysteries and secrets that perhaps would have been better left to the imagination.
All of those little intricacies are just confirmed outright now, and their effect is thus dulled. Corvo and the Outsider become less intriguing, the relationship between Corvo and Emily isn't explored to much effect (and we never learn when everyone found out about the parentage), and most damningly, the Heart's commentary is less bitter and spiteful, instead having Jessamine be sorrowful and directly speak (and even manifest) to your character on some occasions. By answering the questions and then doing unsatisfying things with them, the world is made more conventional and less interesting. It feels like fan fiction trying to clarify all of the mysteries, but written by someone who didn't have the imagination to come up with fitting answers. The luster is just... lost.
All in all, Dishonored 2 is one of my most tumultuous mixed bags in this gaming year. The gameplay is superb and innovates in a number of ways over the previous game's systems, and the city of Karnaca is an immersive world that's just as well designed as Dunwall; for those elements alone, I would heartily recommend it to fans of the first game, and they are what will likely put the game on my "Best of 2016" list. However, so much of the writing falls flat, from the piss-poor story and weak main villain to the lack of mystery and displaced feeling, that at times it's just depressing to watch all of the potential fall apart. It is a superb game, but it is not the sequel that I or many other fans had hoped for, and for all of its improvements, it does not come together nearly as well as its predecessor.
Rating: Dishonorably Discharged
Strap in, 'cause I've got a lot to say.
We'll go with the best stuff first, so we begin with the gameplay. As I've said, Dishonored was no slouch in the gameplay department, so it would take quite a lot of work to improve meaningfully upon it. Fortunately, that's exactly what Dishonored 2 does. The core systems of sneaking around and taking out your enemies remain in place, but numerous updates and additions have been made across the board to tighten up an already fantastic experience. The addition of combat choking, knockouts from above, and assorted non-lethal weaponry makes pursuing a Low Chaos run simpler and more gratifying (which is good, because as I'll establish, Low Chaos is the preferred option in this game). Improvements to the HUD and in-game display elements make the detection system, kill/spare mechanics, and rune hunting much less aggravating, most notably giving you the ability to lock specific runes and bone charms in basic gameplay so you don't have to constantly walk around with the Heart out. Corvo's returning powers from the previous game are mostly either preserved or improved (I say "mostly" because Bend Time has gotten a lot shittier and less effective for some reason), but Emily's new abilities like Domino and Shadow Walk steal the show by being so useful and fun to use. Finally, the divisive Chaos system is much more forgiving; you can waste a few dozen guards without getting a severe penalty, and individual targets have different moral standings that make it either immoral or completely fine to murder them.
The missions are also dramatically tightened up from a gameplay standpoint. The original game had the unforgettable "Lady Boyle's Last Party" and a few other fun change-ups, but it was otherwise pretty much straight stealth with few variations on your goals -- the variety came from how many approaches you could take to solving the problems within these environments. The sequel ramps things up another few degrees, delivering some insanely fun missions with impressive variety to them. The obvious standouts are the prominently-touted "The Clockwork Mansion" (which has you sneaking around and shifting the rooms of a labyrinthine mansion infested with fearsome clockwork sentinels) and "A Crack In The Slab" (whose gimmick is so unexpected and stunning that I won't spoil it), but a few of the other levels presented as straightforward stealth missions wind up having some kind of twist or added complication that makes them all the more fun. The final mission is a bit of a blue-baller, but I'll get to the many failings of the endgame soon.
The final main gameplay change is that supplies are much scarcer, which has an even bigger impact than you'd think. The original game let you restock and purchase upgrades at Piero's workshop before every mission, but the boat that serves as your hub in this one doesn't have a store and comes with very few supplies of its own, forcing you to scavenge environments more thoroughly and make every little pickup count. The store is replaced by black market shops you can track down in alleyways and abandoned storefronts, but their supplies vary, their prices are frequently jacked up, and the shopkeepers can be scared away or killed accidentally. The game does give you opportunities to rob each shop by various means, but doing so prevents you from using that shop again and may lead to other criminals attempting robberies. I appreciated the feeling of desperately surviving and managing which resources I might need for the missions ahead, even if I do miss Piero and the original hub structure.
Moving on, the game's visuals are another area of significant improvement. The original's painterly art style and distinctively unrealistic character models are preserved through the platform shift, yet the graphical fidelity shoots way up -- things are no more realistic than last time, but they look even better within their world. Karnaca is as much a beautifully realized location as Dunwall before it, with an instantly memorable aesthetic and numerous flourishes from the tiniest texture to the distant skybox that make this whole world feel like a place people actually work and live in -- and that's just the way the world is built up visually, to say nothing of the rich lore and environmental interactions. Sadly, the music is not on the same level: many of the original's memorably eerie piano-and-string tunes are gone with nothing but awkward silence to replace them, and the rousing, cathartic piece that played over the original's credits is merely followed up with a random street song that doesn't bring anything to a close, tie into any themes, or sound particularly wonderful on its own.
Now let's focus on some characters. In the original game, Corvo Attano was silent and something of a cipher, but he managed to rise above a lot of silent protagonists with little flashes of personality in his dialogue choices and body language (and the High Chaos finale in particular made him just as compelling as if he'd been voiced). We're not talking about the new DOOM's levels of voiceless personality, but there was something nice there that made him work. Now played by Stephen Russell, I have mixed feelings about him. His weary, depressed personality shines throughout the campaign if you choose him, and his lamentations about how hard he's still taking Jessamine's death even though he brought all of the conspirators to justice feel like natural extensions of his character in the first game. However, Russell's vocal performance comes off just a few degrees too gruff and thuggish for my taste (even if it does fit Corvo's age), and his emotional range isn't going to blow any minds. He does get a few fun bits of dialogue in Karnaca, especially in the district where he grew up (look hard enough, and you might even find his childhood home), as well as an amusing exchange with the Outsider at the start; that's mostly it, though.
This is Emily's story through and through, to the point that it's no wonder Corvo's route feels kind of underdeveloped. The developers clearly intend for you to play through the game the first time with Emily -- the narrative beats work fine enough for Corvo, but it feels more right with her, and everything from the setup of the optional tutorial to her narration in the prologue signals that this is her game. Her demeanor at the beginning and what you're told of her fifteen-year reign easily fit with the little girl you spent so much time protecting in the original, and her progression into either a pragmatic saboteur or a ruthless assassin makes some level of sense even if the plot is too undercooked to make it feel completely natural. Erica Luttrell's performance is great, and her range helps her sell most of the important beats. Not to mention that her powers are ultimately much more fun to use in this setting than Corvo's.
Unfortunately, while Corvo and Emily's bond was one of the driving elements of the original game, the interaction between the two of them is almost nonexistent thanks to Delilah freezing whomever you don't choose to play as in the opening cutscene. You don't see the frozen character again until the very end of the game -- and by "very end," I literally mean the last ten seconds. They had a great opportunity with two voiced characters, but they wasted it. The most interaction Emily gets with her father is in the surprisingly heartwarming optional tutorial, which sees him training her to fend for herself on the streets of Dunwall. Could've had something there, even if it was something as simple as being able to talk to the other character bedridden in the hub boat.
The Outsider was a critical part of giving the original game its ominous, off-kilter feeling, in no small part thanks to how powerfully eerie Billy Lush's performance was, and how it contributed to his characterization as a curious god pushing "interesting" dominos in the world to see where everything falls. Well, that Outsider is not here, and it's not just because Billy Lush got screwed over by Arkane for no reason (they didn't tell him he wouldn't reprise the role even after they brought him in to narrate the trailer!). Robin Lord Taylor does... fine, but he neither reaches Lush's iconic heights nor channels his own talents that make his Oswald Cobblepot one of the few enjoyable characters on Gotham. He's just kind of there. It might be fine if his characterization stayed the same, but this Outsider is openly more helpful, friendlier and less objective about observing where the pieces fall; he even reveals where he came from. There are plot-related reasons for this shift (albeit poor ones, since they revolve around Delilah), and much of his dialogue is at least written in the same tone as the original, but it still feels wrong.
Finally, the villains. Main villainess Delilah Copperspoon was the central antagonist of the original game's two-part Daud DLC The Knife of Dunwall / The Brigmore Witches, and while I didn't really care for or feel threatened by her, she was a serviceable side villain who worked well within the conceit of Daud's story. I had heard that Arkane decided to bring her back for the sequel because they came up with a story worth telling for her and wanted to spend more time making her a cooler character. Everybody chant it with me: You fucked up! You fucked up! You fucked up! Yeah, I'm curious to know what the supposed "story worth telling" was, because none of that is in here. Her performance is just as flatly hammy as it was previously, and she's still characterized as an insanely entitled bitch who thinks she deserves Emily's throne. An attempt is made around the halfway point to make her a sympathetic villain, but the way it's handled and the ultimately generic content of her backstory make everything fall flat even for how intriguing these story beats could be on paper. She doesn't provoke any personal ire, and the fact that she's on the opposite side of the Isles until the last mission makes her seem too distant. Literally everyone -- including the Outsider, who is functionally God -- hypes her up as an impossibly cunning and ruthless threat, but with nothing to back that up, it feels more like the creators shilling a Mary Sue than the building of suspense. She truly is one of the game's weakest links, and things would have been better tenfold had she not been brought back.
Some of the other prominent villains thankfully pick up the slack, at least for the most part. Luca Abele, the Duke of Serkonos, takes a few missions to make more of an impression than "evil tropical dictator archetype"; however, once his characterization kicks in, he steals the show so well that his lacking presence in the game is another huge flaw. Unlike every other antagonist in the series, he makes no pretensions about being a good or deserving ruler; he's a hedonistic, hard-partying manchild who has no justification for his actions and makes nonsensical intercom speeches that sometimes end with "Duke out!" Vincent D'Onofrio gives it his all and makes a damn fine impression; I just wanted so much more out of him than what I got. Also impressing is genius inventor Kirin Jindosh, the owner of the Clockwork Mansion and creator of the Clockwork Soldier enemies -- he only sticks around for a single chapter, but his Riddler / Jigsaw-esque taunting, casually cruel demeanor, and importance to the world give him an edge that makes the already brilliant level even more investing, and it's so fun to finally give him his comeuppance.
The Crown Killer... is less enjoyable. I love the Dishonored world, I love serial killer characters and stories about them, and I loved fighting supernaturally empowered characters in the first game -- the Crown Killer should have been the money shot for me. Hell, you could write the entire plot around the concept of Emily's reign being threatened by a sinister, Outsider-marked killer and the steps taken to track them down. Tragically, though, this promising killer is completely wasted to the point that the very inclusion of this plot element in the game is inconsequential. Her pictured design is fearsome and her murders are sufficiently brutal, but she's tracked down far too early, her identity is obvious from the mission briefing alone, and the confrontation with her is flaccid and unsatisfying even if you deliberately try to drag it out and let her have a fighting chance (to say nothing of how dumb and effortless the Low Chaos solution is). The reasoning behind her existence in the story is questionable at best, and her motives are practically null and void. I wouldn't be so bitter over this if the setup wasn't so promising and made out to be more meaningful than it turns out to be.
And that's as good a transition as any to Dishonored 2's most glaring drawback: the story. It starts off with a rushed coup supported on flimsy reasoning that we're supposed to believe the whole empire bought into, and your character is shuttled off to Karnaca in even less time than it took for Corvo to break out of prison. Even for how well developed Karnaca is, the journey there feels too short even though it's supposed to take place over about a month's time, and the stakes in the city don't feel as high or as bleak as they did in the first game. In fact, the whole conflict lacks a lot in the way of stakes; getting deposed by Delilah feels less like being completely screwed over and more like being faced with a mildly problematic roadblock, and despite the hand-to-mouth supply scavenging and tighter living quarters, you never really feel desperate. The missions may be extremely fun to play, but only a few are made to feel like they have any meaningful impact on how the city operates, and only the last three missions before returning to Dunwall feel like they change the city in any way. It's all distant, vague, and seriously undercooked; the coup by normal humans felt more threatening and difficult to overcome than the takeover by a godlike witch. And while a High Chaos route slowly transforms your character into a bloodthirsty avatar of vengeance, the process doesn't feel nearly as logical as the first game's events made it feel.
Which brings us to the finale, and how badly the game drops the ball here. The final mission in Dishonored changed drastically depending on your Chaos level, with the High Chaos variation and the poetic confrontations contained within it forming one of my favorite endgame scenarios in any game. In this game, you need Low Chaos to get anything out of it -- not because the final mission changes in any way (it remains exactly the same on High or Low Chaos, and exactly as disappointing), but because a critical piece of information that makes one of your main allies relevant to the story is completely withheld from you on High Chaos, making the severing of ties with your allies before the final mission feel hollow and forgettable. The actual content of the mission starts off satisfyingly eerie and atmospheric, but it quickly loses steam as you're pitted against the irritating witches in a version of Dunwall Tower filled with reused assets from the first game. It's both frustratingly quick and goes on longer than it needs to with an artificial roadblock, but at least Delilah's godlike power should make for a satisfying confrontation, right? Nope. The Low Chaos option to deal with her is literally rehashed from the DLC, and battling her straight-on takes about half a minute if you do it right and is weirdly impersonal and silent after so many attempts to build a personal rivalry between the two of you. Then comes the ending, which is just a music-less slideshow narrated by the Outsider that's structured bizarrely and ends anticlimactically. There's actually a sequel hook on Low Chaos, but it sets up a plot I'm not even sure I want.
So the plot's a wash, but that's not the last problem I have. I could talk about how I wish they'd focused more on making a sequel to Dishonored than making a sequel to the DLCs, and I could moan about how badly I wish they hadn't ostracized High Chaos players of both the vanilla game and the DLCs. But instead, what I want to end on is the lack of ambiguity, which is a bigger problem than you might think. Part of Dishonored's mystique was how much of its world was left unexplained, and how many story elements were left to implication and interpretation. Corvo was a figure of mystery whose past was speculated on by a number of people. The Outsider's past was hinted at in supplementary materials, but his exact nature was never confirmed in-game, and the nature of his Void was left as an open, Lovecraftian question. Things like Corvo being Emily's illegitimate father and the Heart containing a fragment of Jessamine's soul were strongly implied, but none of it was outright part of the story. It all came together to give the feeling of a snapshot, a window into a much larger world full of mysteries and secrets that perhaps would have been better left to the imagination.
All of those little intricacies are just confirmed outright now, and their effect is thus dulled. Corvo and the Outsider become less intriguing, the relationship between Corvo and Emily isn't explored to much effect (and we never learn when everyone found out about the parentage), and most damningly, the Heart's commentary is less bitter and spiteful, instead having Jessamine be sorrowful and directly speak (and even manifest) to your character on some occasions. By answering the questions and then doing unsatisfying things with them, the world is made more conventional and less interesting. It feels like fan fiction trying to clarify all of the mysteries, but written by someone who didn't have the imagination to come up with fitting answers. The luster is just... lost.
All in all, Dishonored 2 is one of my most tumultuous mixed bags in this gaming year. The gameplay is superb and innovates in a number of ways over the previous game's systems, and the city of Karnaca is an immersive world that's just as well designed as Dunwall; for those elements alone, I would heartily recommend it to fans of the first game, and they are what will likely put the game on my "Best of 2016" list. However, so much of the writing falls flat, from the piss-poor story and weak main villain to the lack of mystery and displaced feeling, that at times it's just depressing to watch all of the potential fall apart. It is a superb game, but it is not the sequel that I or many other fans had hoped for, and for all of its improvements, it does not come together nearly as well as its predecessor.
Rating: Dishonorably Discharged