Thin like paper
Rockstar’s Bully is leaving me high and dry.
I was pretty excited about the game when I purchased it. I had never tried it out on the PS2, I like GTA well enough, and I’d heard quite a bit of praise from the gaming press.
I can’t echo that praise.
Bully is too over-the-top for me. It’s a thematic quibble, I realize, but the paper-thin stereotypes and cliche grade-school situational comedy feel like cutting-room floor material from a tacky sitcom. Bully is Monty Python minus the distracting accents. It’s Mel Brooks without the charm and occasional brilliance.
This kind of awkward narrative works in GTA because, in part, your frame of reference is so large: the narrative seems somehow less important in the context of a of a city with a New York-sized buffet of gameplay choices. But in the contracted world of Bully, the two-dimensional writing and plotting are too much to bear. Or perhaps even too much to bare.
Maybe I just need to get further into the game. I’m willing to grant that perhaps it really picks up later on. And I can think of a few games I wouldn’t appreciate if I hadn’t finished them, so I’m going to beat it. But at this point at least, playing through Bully seems like a lot of work.