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Is there anyone out there who thinks that Bioshock 2 is the strongest of all the games?

I have a mile-long list of reasons why it's my favourite and was wondering if anyone else felt the same.

I love the story of 2. It's easily my favorite. Delta all the way.

bioshock 1 is my favorite fave, but 2 was a great game and i still enjoyed the crap out of it. it makes me sad that it seems to get ignored a lot, or blown off as ~just a sequel to milk money from the franchise.

At least that isn't as bad as it used to be. I play from two, have for a while, and when I first started doing it there were muns who refused to play with me because 'Bioshock 2 isn't canon.'

Are you serious? Argh, I hate it when roleplayers put up walls like that.

whaaat. i've played from 2 for a while too and haven't experienced that, luckily. who do you play? :D

I was playing Sofia at the time!

i don't think it's the strongest in terms of concept or plot, but i love all of the characters they introduced in that game

The characters are the strongest part of Bioshock 2.

My major issue with the characters of Bioshock and Infinite is that they tend to be very one-dimensional. Ken Levine seems to be in love with the theme that "power corrupts" and so literally every character who gets even a hint of power in 1 or Infinite becomes a crazed, evil supervillain. Hell, the original ending was going to always be "Jack becomes addicted to ADAM and murders all the Little Sisters" before executive meddling made him put in a "good" ending.

So where Bioshock 1 treated everyone in Rapture as crazed ADAM addicts who fell under the weight of their own hubris, Bioshock 2 takes a lot of time to treat some of them as people. 2 underscores the tragedy of Rapture by focusing on how many good people were caught in its wake: the kindergarten teacher who sacrificed herself for her kids, the railway engineer driven to suicide, the worker conned into assembling needles.

Hell, Bioshock 2 treated Andrew Ryan as a better character. The first game doesn't offer him one ounce of sympathy, unless you count the audio log where he hires a plumber. In Bioshock 2, he's worrying about how his workaholic lifestyle is neglecting his family, thinking about having a child, and is openly disturbed by the propaganda museum he was convinced to build. There's even an audio log where Sofia Lamb, the main villain, is lamenting her own choices because there are lines that even she does not wish to cross.

And I think this humanisation passes to the companions too. Elizabeth is a good partner but I cared more about Eleanor. There are a lot of parallels between them, but... Eleanor feels more important and active in the plot. She's a damsel in distress (like Elizabeth), but unlike Elizabeth the entire game is her taking positive and proactive steps towards freeing herself from her own captivity. Booker doesn't meet Elizabeth until one-third of the way into the game; Eleanor is providing instruction and plasmids to Delta from the very start.

And you can change her. You can change things in Bioshock 2! A recurring theme in Bioshock 1 and Infinite is providing the illusion of choice but then reinforcing the idea that you have no choice or control. You can't disobey Atlas, and it doesn't matter whether you choose the Bird or the Cage. Meanwhile, in Bioshock 2 you can spare or kill three key characters, change how the entire endgame plays out, and access up to six endings (if you count the two variations of the three). That's actually awesome and gives both feedback and replayability.

Sorry, I can't go on enough about how much I love this game.

I love you, anon. I swear I could've written this in my sleep.

You fucking nailed it. Stuff like Ryan's audio diary about his legacy or the diary where he finds out that Joelene sold his DNA have stuck with me just as much as his big winding speeches in Bioshock 2. The "boss" characters in BS1 and Infinite (Steinman, Cohen, Slate, Fitzroy, etc.) are basically circus clowns, but Holloway, Poole and even Alex the Great, the hammiest fucker ever, were actual people with backstories and motivations and complexities to them that make you pause and think hard about what you wanna do with them.

It's unfortunate that most of the stuff related to the main plot is Bioshock 2's weak point - they don't gracefully insert Lamb into the overall lore (lol no really dude she totally owned Ryan in public once, it was so cool!!!!) and her "master plan", even after reading Jordan Thomas' explanation for it on the 2K forums so I fucking understood what she was actually trying to accomplish, frankly is just a bunch of nonsense.

But the character writing makes up for it and the game does exactly what BS1, Infinite and Burial at Sea screw up, it totally sticks the landing. Everything from the beginning of the last level on is brilliant and the endings in particular are great because of how they vary and how the player influences them. Personally I think the neutral ending perfectly, perfectly suits the tone of the game, but that's up to interpretation.

And that's not even touching on Minerva's Den, which basically hits it out of the park in every way possible.

Structurally, it's far and away the strongest. Bioshock 1 is an amazing game top to bottom but it dove off a cliff in the third act and Infinite kinda sucked. Another anon already hit why Bioshock 2's story was so compelling, so I might as well blather about the gameplay.

Bioshock 2 made some very fruitful tweaks to the gameplay and character customization. They allowed you to dual-wield weapons and plasmids, which greatly improved the flow of combat. They fleshed out the melee weapon by making the drill run on its own fuel and adding the drill dash (realtalk: Drill Dash is the funnest fucking thing in the game, even more than bee tornadoes), making it not only an always handy sidearm but completely viable for melee-only runs (not to say the wrench wasn't, that thing was a fucking doombringer. Skyhook is a joke, though). They streamlined and expanded on the plasmids, greatly tweaking the upgrade system so that you were constantly gaining new powers even at the end of the game and went further by adding in plasmid combinations. And they changed hacking so it's not a cut-away minigame but a quick QTE that's done in the middle of the action. And they added the hack tool which allowed for long distance hacking, letting them get more creative with the level design.

They were all really small changes, but in the end, it made the game flow so much better, both in the combat and the level design. Things move so much more quickly than in Bioshock 1 and the character growth feels so much more genuine because you're constantly earning new powers by way of the Gatherer missions. And because of the depth and speed of the combat and the way the game encourages you to try different methods of defending your Little Sisters by mixing up the terrain, the Gathering is really fun and doesn't feel like a tedious escort mission like it did in BS1.

I wish it had added a couple more weapons and plasmids (or at least brought over the chemical thrower from BS1 - that thing was badass) and that they had gone even further with the plasmid combinations, but the gameplay in Bioshock 2 was filled with a bunch of subtle improvements that made it an incredibly strong game. And then, whoops - Irrational Games completely frickin' ignored all the subtle improvements 2K Marin made and went in the totally opposite direction for Infinite, so it plays exactly like BS1 but stripped down and overly streamlined to the point where even Call of Duty is side-eyeing it. The worst part about it is the vigors. The plasmids in BS2 had so much variety and so much depth in the upgrades, which is completely gone in Infinite. The overall number of Vigors is down from BS1 and BS2 and they all sort neatly into "AoE damage" or "AoE stun" with a couple exceptions.

BS1 had somewhat antiquated gameplay that was nonetheless structured beautifully. BS2 applied some inspired tweaks for a greatly improved experienced. I really would've loved to see further improvements on Bioshock 2's formula but Infinite just missed the mark so thoroughly. I really hope whoever Take Two gives the Bioshock license back to goes back to the roots.

Credit where credit is due though, Burial at Sea episode 2 at least tried something pretty cool by giving you a less tanky character, bringing back health kits over that stupid shield, emphasizing stealth and melee takedowns and the crossbow was well-implemented and had three different kinds of ammo (something Infinite as a whole missed the boat on). Peeping Tom made the stealth pretty much a joke but they gave it a shot at least and you can play the game different ways because they ditched that stupid two weapon limit and brought back the weapon wheel. It was cool that they tried to get back to Bioshock's roots while making Elizabeth feel like a unique character to play as.

I love this anon, too.

Oh, hell, I'm basically just slathering this entire BS2 thread in love.

Totally agreed.

In addition, changing the camera into a video recorder and turning it into a combo-based minigame was a stroke of genius. There's something so satisfying when you hear the "ch-ching!" at the end.

Infinite just lacks the sheer creativity that Bioshock 2 did. B2 was all about taking control of an area; Infinite is plowing through an area. Infinite gives you options (open a tear to "cover" or open a tear to "sentry gun") while Bioshock 2 gives you tools (the hack gun, proximity bolts, trap plasmids, environmental hazards...).

WHOA THERE SON

you don't diss the bee tornadoes

but no, you just perfectly articulated a lot of my feelings about bioshock infinite's gameplay vs bioshock 1 or 2. personally i preferred the wrench to the drill, which i'm distinctly unfond of, but YES-- i love the sheer number of ways you could dominate an area in bioshock 2 using any combination of weapons or plasmids (trap rivets, mini turrets, summon bots, bee tornadoes, firebombs) and how the gather missions were perfect setups for the player to go wild and have fun with it. bioshock infinite's gameplay wasn't even streamlined, just stripped to the bones, and wasn't even half as fun as a result.

i have a whole 'nother slew of issues with elizabeth's gameplay in burial at sea, but most of them are centered around the fact that i think they implemented the stealth element incredibly poorly and inconsistently

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