Review: Bully

Bully (2006, Rockstar) is the story of enlightenment through pugilation, AKA The American Dream. Seriously, though, it's about a kid who's dumped in a boarding school for troublesome children while his mother and her new husband (Number five? Six? It's hard to keep count.) go on a year long honeymoon.

Gameplay
Rockstar, for those of you who don't know, made the Grand Theft Auto games, Manhunt, and The Warriors. Bully definitely has aspects that are similar. The large environment, the large variety of activities, and the okay but not great combat are all intact. It should be mentioned that the hand to hand is decidedly better than all of those games. Even when I had a full inventory of weapons, I much preferred mixing it up.

The thing that sets Bully apart, is how many other things there are to do. Sure, GTA has a lot of side errands, but Bully has a bit more. There are classes to take, games to play at the boardwalk, money to be made mowing lawns and delivering papers, people who will randomly come to you with problems they need help with or dares you can accept or decline, and there's lots more. They're mostly just diversions, not full games unto themselves, but they're a nice change of pace and learning the one or two tricks to them provides a brief, Wario Ware type rush.

Theatrics
So technically I'm going to keep talking about the gameplay here for a bit because some of the most significant mechanics are about making you feel like a kid.

Many missions in the game are designed to tell the story and show, rather than tell, who these kids are.

***SPOILERS***
(highlight to read by pressing CTRL+A or just dragging the mouse cursor over them)

I'll always remember the mission objective "beat the gate code out of the nerd". I was expecting to beat him down and take a piece of paper off of him, or watch a cut scene after a standard fight. He folds after the first punch saying, "It's 1138" and it's over. That was awesome, and gave me a sense of character more than any dialog would. And the game is full of stuff like that. Jocks like to tackle. The preppies use "fisticuffs" (so sweep the leg, Johnny). And the greasers are often fought on bikes ('cause they're too young for motorcycles).

***SPOILERS***

Almost everything you do in Bully is on the clock. When you wake up, you've got about a minute and a half to get to class before you're considered truant and have to dodge school prefects (or cops if your ditching in town). Then you've got another minute and a half for lunch. Then your last class. Then you can roam free until curfew. Then you can roam unfree until 2AM, at which point you collapse and wake up with a minute and a half to get to class again. It certainly evoked the rigid structure of childhood for me. In fact, when I completed all my classwork and didn't have to go to classes anymore, I was weirded out.

Another gameplay addition was the social system. When locking on to a character, a little menu gives social options, like greet, insult, flirt, push, bribe; apologize. It could have been implemented a little better as you're often talking over who you're supposed to be conversing with, but just the concept of being able to talk your way out of trouble or provoke a fight (generally near an authority figure who would cream the other kid for you) added a lot to the feel of the game.

On the more traditional front, the acting and directing in the game is pretty good. The characters are fairly stereotypical, in the Rockstar tradition. The plot generally a collection of clichés as well. But it mostly works. From the intro cinematic, I felt for Jimmy. And when the time came, I was ready to lay some smack down. Eventually, I got a little sick of the way the game took him, though. While the violence in Bully is very subdued compared to Rockstar's other games, it's still used to solve too many problems. I really would have liked it if the end of the game had involved more brains and less brawns, not that certain people didn't have it coming, mind you, but it would have been more fulfilling if Jimmy had figured out a better way to overcome at least some of the final obstacles. Plus his bragging over defeated foes made him seem like a big jerk and only served to highlight how ridiculous his exploits had become. Maybe I'm thinking wrong to want a hero in a Rockstar game, though. They only give you the lesser evil, as a rule.

Aesthetics
The game has the functional look of a PS2 title using RenderWare (the graphics engine Rockstar licensed for most of its PS2 releases). Special note needs to be given to the fact that the campus and town go through seasons as you play, and seeing the skeletons hanging in the quad or the Xmas lights in the city are worth wandering around just to see.

Final Score
A five.

Out of five.

The only things I wanted from Bully were more content and more refinements. And to that end...

Suggestions
There was some stuff about Bully that bugged me. I'm assuming the upcoming 360 and Wii ports won't improve these things either, but I just wanted to air them semi-publicly and didn't feel like padding my post count by making them a separate article. :)

First off, the combat had some annoyances that didn't need to be there.

Fighting multiple opponents didn't have to be so awkward. Often times I found myself getting attacked by someone who was obviously in my field of view, but because I was locked on to someone else, I would take the hits, instead of, you know, moving my hands a little to block a punch from someone else. I know I'm not playing Dante here, but with as much time as I spent in the boxing ring, it seems like I should have been able to block those blows.

Speaking of which, when I was boxing, I could duck and counter. What happened to that? Shouldn't the uppercut I learned work for that?

Second, I think the immersion provided by the school atmosphere, as great as it was could have been even better.

It seemed bizarre that you could show up to class with five minutes to go and still learn everything. What if it worked like this? If you show up before class or in the first half hour, you get the full time, lives, whatever, to complete your task. Then you reduce that for each half hour late until, if you show up in the last half hour, you basically get nothing. Of course, the classes never gave homework, either, but that's probably too far to go for realism.

For the overachievers who finish all their classes, the aftermath just seemed weird. Bullworth Academy was supposed to be oppressive, not the kind of place where you could skip class just because you'd "done enough work". Why not be able to exchange classes after level five for a job in town (close to one of my save spots so I can get there in the morning)? It could be the same mini-games, but it'd feel a little less strange for the boss of a half ass work study program not to care where I was than the administration at the academy. Plus I'd feel like I had beaten the system, which is always good.

Also, no Santa outfit? Sure, there's a piece of Xmas attire in the game, but I wanted the Santa outfit and the sack of "presents" (doorknobs) to deal with anyone who laughed at it. >:)