Now Available on PS4, XBox One, PC
Developer: Ubisoft
First part of South Park: Fractured But Whole is to play South Park: The Stick of Truth. I don’t mean to be reductive, but Stick of Truth is so good. And I mention it for a reason – Fractured But Whole is a great game to play and a fantastic experience, but is essentially expansive downloadable content (DLC) for the original. But the most lovingly crafted and inspired DLC with fine tweaks to the nooks and crannies of the gameplay experience.
FBW has your favorite South Park characters coming straight off the last game, where the kids were playing Wizards and Dragons, to now playing superheroes, and managing movie and Netflix franchising for their IP. As “New Kid” (aka Douchebag, Buttlord, and many variations thereafter), you uncover a conspiracy as you are caught in the middle of a Marvel-style civil war between the Coon and Friends faction (led by Cartman as The Coon), and the Freedom Pals faction (led by Timmy as Professor Timmy). If you’ve ever seen a Marvel or DC movie, the satire here is pretty obvious to you, but it’s also pretty funny. Every kid’s superhero character has either generalized or specific references to a comic book counterpart – Professor Timmy is Professor Xavier, Kenny’s Mysterion is Batman (as is The Coon), Token’s Tupperware is Iron Man, and so forth. Just that in itself is a lot of fun.
If you’re up to date on South Park in general – the rest of the game is super fun as well. The town is lovingly recreated, and most details are available for you to explore. Every character I could think of is available as either a playable combatant, boss, NPC, summon or reference – you can fight alongside the favorite shipped power-couple Super Craig and Wonder Tweek, fight against the specifically named Red-Wine-Drunk Randy Marsh, run a quest for Big Gay Al, summon Religious Super Friend Moses and much more. The returns are getting a little marginal in swimming through show paraphernalia if you’ve played the first game. It was still magical to me to interact with a show I started sneaking down to watch with my dad when I was 12 years old – but less so – if a third game ends up getting made (and inevitably delayed), I would recommend a totally new world to explore.
On to the gameplay itself. I’ve been shocked at how traditionally the South Park games skew as turn-based RPGs. The closest comparison previously for me were the Super Mario RPG games, since all battles reward active time button presses to recover health or add to the ultimate power meter. The beautiful wrinkle added to combat this go around is adding the grid system, for movement and attack radius. This allows the player to put together thoughtful parties and choose from so many interesting abilities – some target a line of squares along a grid, some fan out in an “X,” some target a specific Area of Effect (AoE), and all have the ability to knock enemies into walls or into party members for more damage.
Returning to the game are an elaborate series of buffs and debuffs where the resulting status impacts are almost more important than the attack damage. Plus the debuffs are fun stuff like bleeding, throwing up and being on fire – what more could you want. Unlike some RPGs, the battles end up being the thing I was looking forward to the most, and would get excited when a random encounter would pop up. High praise for the battle system.
The dungeon crawling is more generic. Throughout the maps, there is a built in Metroidvania function where combination abilities are learned throughout the game with your battle buddies to be able to solve new puzzles and reach new places (most involve farting). After the initial flash wears off, most of the game has the New Kid going through the motions – do a little Fart Rage here, a little Fartkour there. It becomes a little routine.
And there’s not much variety to the 2.5D environment you walk through – most of the time is spent going left to right, then right to left, and just trying to fart on enemies before they punch you (what a metaphor for life). None of the dungeons are that “dungeony” either – mostly, the Civil War style meetup battles and the inspired bosses are the showcases in the game. In fact, when beating the game, and in the throes of the final conflict, I blinked and pretty much missed the endgame. It’s a great laugh line for the show, but a rough transition for a game that you put 20+ hours into. But still, it’s a blast that you can’t compare to other experiences if you’re into South Park – until they make a How I Met Your Mother real-time strategy game.
Is it “Playlist” Worthy? Yes – but you need to either be jazzed up about South Park, or about turn-based RPGs.
