Oh yeah, so I like beat the game and stuff.
The true ending was not what I expected. Except it was, mostly. I suspected the player character was a sort of programmed killer, that someone obviously had an agenda and you were their tool. But a Ruso-American conspiracy? That's pants-on-the-head silly even by the 80s standards. So there's an organization of militia/conspirators/wing nuts who developed long-distance mind control, thought and sensory manipulation so they could undermine the Ruso-American conspiracy by....killing lots of gangsters? Oooook. I guess with a game like this, all bets are off. You just have to take the ride. Still, it seemed like a cheesy rationale for what's been a really grim and twisted game up until now.
I kinda don't know what to make of the ending. For a game that gave you only impressions and subjective interpretation, having the actual plot (since it's the truth regardless of whether Richard or Motorcycle Guy lived) laid out for me kind of left me underwhelmed. Maybe that's just the nature of secrets, I guess. There's an implied occult angle as well as an implied larger conspiracy beyond the 50 Blessings (we have powerful friends....) and it's left to debate who the three characters in the PC's dreams really were. Maybe they were just facets of his subconscious, an expression of the player character's psyche lashing out against the domination they were experiencing. Maybe they were members of 50 Blessings just fucking with Richard's head to keep him off balance. Maybe they weren't even human. I'd like to believe they're actual entities, even though the masks were ostensibly provided by the 50 Blessings. I suppose we'll find out more in the DLCs.
It's odd that I found myself morbidly drawn to the Hotline Miami "World", and now with the curtain sort of pulled back it's not quite as interesting. At least the grand conspiracy part of it. (There's plenty of other things to speculate about.) I was prepared for pretty much anything. The Devil, Just Plain Crazy, Pawn of the Government, even It Was All A Dream. But the US government in a secret conspiracy with the Russians? It's just silly!
I guess I do have one lingering question though.....why pay attention to the phone calls at all? Was the character compelled in a way that was never expressed by the story, either by mind control or by madness? What convinces the wearers of the masks to actually do as they're told? Why does no one, as I think a game hint implies, just turn themselves into the police? My only real answer is mind control.
Anyways, my take on the story. Disaffected guy who lost his GF gets chosen by the 50 Blessings as a subject. They manipulate his mind and he begins to question reality, and which point he starts taking the missions for them (for some reason.) In rescuing the girl he alerts the patriots that he's going off mission and Richter is sent to kill them both. He fails. Somewhere in Richter's storyline, he gets arrested and the player does him in. The Three's ultimate desire is for Richard to kill Motorcycle Guy (or maybe work with him), since once he learns about the larger conspiracy he's a threat to the order. Once the player kills Motorcycle guy, they have no further use for Richard, hence "Nothing you do matters anymore."
This is why I think ultimately that the Three are not the player's subconscious, and they're not members of the 50 Blessings manipulating them. Their prescience, if we can take anything the story presents us at face value, says they're more than that. When I first saw Rasmus was an Owl and the mask allowed you to "see" secrets, I thought there's some sort of spiritual/occult connection here that's being covered by several layers of disguises and plausible alternatives. (There's some weird occult-looking symbols scattered around toward the end game, including right outside Richard's apartment door.) And I think the Three are opposed to the 50 Blessings and whatever else is behind them. The Horse (Blue) in Richard's dreams actually seems to feel a little sorry for him, while Rasmus seems to hate what the player is doing regardless of why they're doing it. Richard (Yellow) seems to be detached from his fate, the balance between the two extremes.
Another thought I had was that all the "nice" clerks you meet before shit starts going weird are secretly dosing you through the food, the drinks and the movies so you're in the control of 50 Blessings. (Notice how in the early game you never have to pay for anything, "your money is no good here..." ect...After you rescue the girl and the nice clerk is replaced by the dick, you're on the outs with the 50 Blessings. And all the dead guys you see as you go through the later game are probably just fractured chunks of psyche. Maybe.
Or maybe it's all just a fantastical, barely related, 4th wall-breaking acid plot, that's not supposed to make any sense. I thought, right before The Motorcycle Guy chapters, that's what it was. And then the game took an abrupt turn for the rational and the coherent because you're seeing it through the lens of a character that isn't batshit crazy. And now I'm left thinking that there might actually be an internal logic to the whole thing, and they weren't just fucking with the player through constant misdirection.
super fake edit
Ok. What if the nice clerks you see in the beginning of the game are actually the clerks from the future. Think about it. Everyone knows you, "you lost your girlfriend", "your money is no good here" "this one's on the house." You're being remembered and rewarded for cleaning the whole city of scumbags.
What if the scenes in the early game is actually you walking around AFTER the events of the game? When the clerk points to the corpse on the ground and is like "that's not really here", that's what he's trying to tell you. You've already been through everything at that point. You assume when people tell you that you look terrible, it's because of the levels you've been doing. It's actually because of everything you've been through.
And then when things switch and the nice clerk is replaced by the scumbag clerk, that's you actually walking around in the present time. The game is showing you moments of Richard's life out of sync and you're unable to tell just from context what time period it is, except for the small contextual things the nice clerks say.
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Topic: Hotline Miami - Now Cheaper! $6.74 (Read 9461 times)