Bioshock Infinite Critique | After the Hype

I got invested in both Booker and Elizabeth so hard when I first played this and when Burial at Sea was revealed I had wished it was just some random spinoff giving us more Booker and Elizabeth with a splash of Rapture rather than what we got. Visually it's beautiful but it's like Levine forgot his own game.

I found it distastefully disappointing.

For one thing they promised the choices you made would impact the story and you'd be presented with different choices each time. Instead the choices are fixed and make almost no difference at all.

The original Boys of Silence were a great idea but they just reduced them to something ordinary, simple and stupid.

I thought the ultimate plan to destroy the surface world was going to be something epic like Elizabeth opening a colossal tear directly to the surface of the sun. But they just attack it? Colombia had zeppelins, machine guns and rocket launchers. 1980s USA had jet fighters, ground-to-air missiles and nuclear weapons. I think they'd be fine.

And a lot of the story doesn't make sense.

Most of all I hated what they did to Elizabeth's character and how they ended her story, especially in Burial at Sea. My friend said "They took a Disney princess and made her a psychopath." And this guy was a bit of a pessimist already.
I stopped playing this after the DLC came out. I haven't played it since nor, do I ever intend to.

Would you believe there are people who claim that Burial at Sea "perfectly" ties up the series?

I would have preferred the version they used for the early trailers and demos, provided that Elizabeth didn't end up like the one in Burial at Sea. Because it certainly buried my love for this game.
Also I swear the difficulty was secretly cranked up to 11.

I loved Infinite. I always found it so jarring when people praised TLoU. To me, Bioshock was telling a siniliar story but with actual heart and soul.

I watched your Batman videos and got a good laugh from each one, shitting on Cruz, that deserves a subscribe.

Infinite’s story sucked booty cause Elizabeth was too emotional and all over the place. Stuck in a tower all her life but can maneuver through combat and gun fire just fine, has anger towards her mother but every history book says Lady Comstock was murdered by Fitzroy a week after her birth (even if it wasn’t Fitzroy, there’s no reason to hate her mom).

Her AI is superb tho. She gets unnerved when you aim your weapon at her head and steps out of the way. It was funny seeing her dance when I quickscope aimed with the Sniper.

"Stuck in Elizabeth" Now that's a Meme-able sentence if i've ever heard one

Damn I love this game series so much but after playing through all the games and the dlc you do realise how BioShock 2 screws up the whole lore if infinite and burial at sea are canon. lets just hope that the supposed BioShock 4 that's in the works, or at least was in the works, can fix some stuff. and the BioShock Netflix movie I'm super excited for that but, overall a great video that had me engaged the whole time.

I really do not like Elizabeth's death in Burial at Sea. I feel that her actions leading up to her death was avoidable. I felt that she didn't need to die. There could have been a alterative ending.

I'm aware as I'm typing this that the bar is below ground, but oh my god, thank you for pointing out lack of subtitles and saying that there's no excuse for it. It's such an easy bar to clear in regards to accessibility, but so many people are willing to throw it out and act like disabled folks just aren't entitled to play video games.

Criticizes the 2a then gives perfect example of why we have the 2a

I think the 'controller face' falls short here. I loved the andrew ryan depiction. It worked really well!
In this controller face, Elizabeth's necklace looks like a crooked, toothy grin. Constructive criticism; I'd have placed 'lips' on the contoller face, roughly where you put andrew ryan's moustache, and placed the necklace dangling below the controller.

Criticism aside, i noticed that you changed the hair to a short bun, then switched to a greying braid when talking about old Elizabeth. I think that's emblematic of your eye for detail, and frankly, it's excellent work!

I think, overall, this specific form of 'controller face' art is well done, but it could have benefited from a small amount of 'focus testing', if you want to call it that 😅

You really need to plug your podcast more. Ive watched 6+ hours of bioshock content uninterrupted and im just finding out about it due to a literal 2 second long plug. It's like you're ashamed of it or something. I love your writing 'voice' and I'm kind of desperate to hear more! Consider me subscribed on spotify ;)

At the end of Battleship Bay's 'train' station, the NPC's acting stiff, rigid and out of place is intentional. The man who has a violin is not playing it because he doesn't know how. They're all undercover agents. It seems like nobody is talking, and they're all waiting for your presence in order to 'come alive', because canonically, they * are * waiting for you.

It seems like they have nowhere to be, because they don't. Other civillian NPC's at least have orbiting patrols they take, or cyclic animations and dialogue 'calls' and responses. These guys don't, because they're all just waiting, itching to kill you.


That part of the level before the ambush is meant to be unsettling. There isn't even any music or score.

I do wish we got the demo version of the game, but I don’t hate it. It is a fun game. I do hope we get a bioshock 4. For Burial At Sea, they should have said no, it didn’t take place in the same universe as the original game, but in an alternate where Columbia was made first and then Rapture. Episode 2 also never should have happened.

Played once. Done forever. I mean the "thoughtology" of Ken Levine is pretty weak this game.

You're take on the Constitution is beyond fucking stupid. I'm not even a Liberal, I don't even necessarily like the American Constitution, but your take is dumb.

thing is, objectively there never was any hype for this game so why even make the video?

My violence inhibitors are a joke. No, really. I only keep them enabled because of how funny they are

I played it years after the hype when all three games were 20 dollars on the switch EShop , i played souly for the plot and lore and was pretty satisfied

I like the burial at sea twist with daisy, not bc it "clears" her moral or some shit like that (there was nothing to clear to begin with), it's bc portraits her as someone willing to give everything to her cause. I admire her a fucking lot for taking the bullet

I honestly can't stand bioshock infinite but I'm glad people are able to get enjoyment out of it where i can't. Every time i try and play it the more frustrated i find myself and for all the criticism of it the best word i can use to describe my frustration is ludo-narrative dissonance. Like it or not, no one has come up with a better name for it. It's the gameplay equivalent of running on a hamster wheel.

I think it's less that the story is saying you should be held responsible for any action your multiversal selves are capable of. to us the story's always been about guilt and repentance - what do you do if you've done something wrong. and what the story is saying is that no choice in the future will change the person your actions have already lead you to become. the choices you've already made aren't in superposition - they've been observed, they've collapsed into a constant. the future selves you could become are limited by one thing - they're all steps forward from where you stand now. there is no way to be free from the influence of our own history. when we do something, whether wrong or right, our future is forever shaped by it. there is no way to be born again

I feel like me not following the development of infinite really increases my enjoyment of it. Despite its imperfections it’s still one of my favorite games and is as almost as memorable an experience to me as playing the first bioshock.

But also side note don’t count my girls Ariel and Cinderella. Their stories are kind of all about personal agency, striving for their dreams, and adapting to live their best lives!

America doesn’t see racism as a problem, they see it as a necessary evil

I love your channel and many of your videos. I listen to this one all the time at work just because I love the game

I'm white as snow but that doesn't mean I don't get an opinion. As for the stab. in my eyes elizabeth COULD have done nothing if the story was written that way. but what would have happened next? The black woman would have kill a privileged white boy and then all articles would be flipped. people falsify claiming that the slaughter of the whites is glorified while the opposing voice say its just a game.

Nothing can happen without someone screaming foul ball therefore i choose to remind people that if they think a line of code from a video game is equal to stabing black woman in the back i question your sanity. Offensiveness is something i accepted as a daily occurrence back in kindergarten when i was mocked for wearing glasses. If you haven't realized it now I'll say it, humans of all tones SUCK. its just routine to me by now and one day it will be boring to you too. WHY care about this ? it will happen everywhere till the end time. Something SOMEWHERE HAS TO LOSE FIRST. get over it.

Or, do what I do.
Ignore all hype for upcoming games. Eventually, a couple years after it comes out, get it on a sale and play it with no expectations. I almost never fail to have a blast!

Then I look up stuff about it and find out everyone else is disappointed, and feels like they were lied to. Every time it happens, I'm like, well ya, thats what happens when you get swept up in hype. Stop doing that!

This was a too long and complex video for a videogame... And i enjoyed every second of it.

I’ve never really given much thought to how the rest of the world views the American constitution and Bill of Rights. I can understand how strange it seems from an outside perspective. In order to understand why American's put so much value in its words, you need to understand the context in which it was written and what its purpose was. It was written by a group of people who were tired of living in fear of a tyrannical government. They were tired of feeling as though they had no control over their lives and they were willing to put those lives on the line in order to change that. The constitution was made to prevent that same situation from happening again in the future. It is saying that the people come first and the government is in service of the people, not the other way around. The Bill of Rights are the rights and powers the people allow the government to have; it limits control.

It isn’t a matter of tyranny being an inevitability without the constitution, it’s that without it, there is little in the way of a government and/or individual in power from incrementally taking liberties away from the people in order to seize more control. Hitler was an evil man, but he wasn’t a stupid man. Nobody knew what was happening until it was too late; he turned a republic into a dictatorship without much opposition.

The second amendment that gives us the right to bear arms is a contingency to prevent a similar occurrence from happening here. Again, it’s not a matter of tyranny being inevitable without that right, it’s the fact that we have no way to defend ourselves if things start heading in that direction. That’s why it’s a right that many are not willing to relinquish, especially when it isn’t solving the actual problem in society that caused the government to want to revoke it. Removing firearms doesn’t remove the desire to cause harm, and that can be done without firearms.

I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything with this, you all have the right to your opinion. I’m just providing context and some insight from an American perspective. I’ve never played the Bioshock games, but I thoroughly enjoyed your videos about them.

The main plot inevitably boils down to Booker traveling back in time to have his future daughter "baptize" himself to prevent him from becoming a racist dictator that builds a "white city" (based on a real whites only city) in the sky, which I find quite hilarious when said out loud.

I got some ramblings about Burial at Sea and Elizabeth that come to mind. I apologize if they are not logically put together and they ramble on, but I hope it’s an interesting discussion nevertheless.

Burial at sea is what happens when somebody messes with forces they don’t understand.

Elizabeth goes from this doe-eyed innocent to a cynical villain because she has seen everything by this point. She’s explored all of reality, seen all its beauty… and couldn’t stop thinking about the Bookers and Comstocks. With her powers, she could end every one of them and wipe them from existence, even the innocent ones, even the redeemed ones, even the heroic ones, and so much more.

Elizabeth’s dimension-hopping and becoming that multiversal “goddess” created a retcon to the reality that made the first Bioshock game, and Burial At Sea Part 2 is Elizabeth fighting tooth and nail to make sure the game happens “as it is supposed to”. But, that results in her coming to terms with the consequences of her actions. History is rewritten, the plot is nearly derailed and reality itself could fracture unless things are “set back on course”.

I think it’s unfair to assume that Elizabeth wouldn’t become a cynical manipulator of fate after achieving multiversal goddess powers; similarly, I think it’s unfair to assume Elizabeth wouldn’t face consequences for her actions now that she can manipulate fates across multiple timelines and dimensions. Her fall as a character was inevitable, in a sense.

Elizabeth is this epitome of the Ayn Randian protagonist: she was put into a powerless situation, and with her powers and abilities she throws off the shackles of family, of duty, of government, of racism and societal pressure, of reality itself, and becomes the ultimate self-made person. Her isolation as a child was just a cage holding her back, when she finally breaks it all reality is open to her. Her riches and privileged position were never earned by her, and she rejects them once she is no longer imprisoned. The Comstocks and Booker DeWitts could be seen as parasites clinging to Elizabeth’s greatness, and in time Elizabeth did away with those too.

But, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Her single-minded crusade to end the Bookers and Comstocks left her cut off from her powers and abilities, because she got what she wanted. The rest of Burial at Sea was her cleaning up the mess that she made in her self-righteous goddess-hood, and once she finishes that clean-up to set up Jack to do what he is going to do, she can rest, her life ending as another victim of Frank Fontaine, just like many before. She dies as human as anybody else can be.

as a lakota, i think the use of wounded knee was completely tasteless and used as shock value. booker is never punished for his crimes and the story never touches back on this detail other than a few voxophones (hidden dialogue) later in the game. theres also a lack of research with native history. booker is not "sioux", hes tetonwan (lakota dialect) - oceti sakowin. "sioux" is a slur used by the french after they mispronounced the ojibwe language. there were no native soldiers. no "good" indians. everyone was "punished" for custers death. booker wouldnt have LIVED if he was at wounded knee.

You might be the player character, but Elizabeth is the protagonist. You're on her adventure.

Is the DLC canon? I would say no. Not to me.

Just because one person claimed ownership of the series—a series that contains a game he wasn't even involved in—doesn't make it true.

Giving him that power disenfranchises all of the other people who worked to make the series possible.

This is a very well made video. Very thorough and very well put together

I’ll alway have a special place for Bioshock infinite. It released around the same time my grandma passed away. I just remember locking myself away in my room and immersed myself. By the end of the game I just cried

I think a SLIDERS box set is a better use of ones time and money than playing Bioshock Infinite again.

I know it's been a year but actually, Booker picks Tails, the coin always lands on heads.

Your comment on the constitution is the most dogshit typical UK trash you could've said. I should've known better than to expect common sense from a brit