South Park - The Stick of Truth: It's the show in playable format!

My Mom is a pretty interesting person. Masters graduate, devout catholic, supportive of her children, and generous to friends and family to a fault. She's pretty awesome but she and I stand on opposite sides on a lot of things. I listen to metal, she likes show tunes. I like RPGS, she prefers casual games. I love tex-mex, and she doesn't (and is wrong). But one thing that one thing that we share without question is our complete love of the show South Park.

Now, South Park has never really had a good game iteration in its history, so I was pretty excited to hear that Matt Stone and Trey Parker were going to be directly involved. But as is the curse of video game development, there were delays, glitchy problems, and generally iffy reviews. But a lot of media sources that I tend to frequent were telling me that if I am a fan of the show, I will be a fan of the game. With concerns of game length, I held off on buying it, waiting for it drop down in price. I happened to be near a redbox and gave it a look, and 360 copy was available. So I had to dust off the old girl and fire her up to play.....

SOUTH PARK: THE STICK OF TRUTH

The story opens up with an animated vignette (not unlike their Heavy Metal spoof) describing a war between the human forces and drow elves, and how thanks to the efforts of the "Grand Wizard" (Cartman) they have laid claim to the mighty "Stick of Truth" and whoever has possession of it's power can shape the universe as they see fit.

You and your family have just moved into South Park. You are somewhat of a quiet child, and although your parents are loving, they seem as if the move here is being used to escape something. After creating the new you, your parents send you out to go make some friends. Quickly stepping outside  (or being thrown out by your father if you take too long like I did), you will run into your new neighbor Butters. He welcomes you to town and invites you to play with them and takes you to the "Kingdom of Kupa Keep" (yes, the KKK), to meet the Grand Wizard King, Cartman. To prove your loyalty you become embroiled in the war between the Humans and Elves over the Stick of Truth.

Unassuming but All-Powerful, the bearer of the Stick of Truth holds the power to
shape the Universe as one see's fit...... Or really just has a stick and bragging rights.

So right out of the gate, I have to say that the visual style is absolutely spot on. It literally is an exact representation of the show. When you move everyone hops around in place with slight motions of the arm, and very little leg movement. The paper cutout style of art/flash animation is faithfully recreated, but now we actually have a layout to the town of South Park which allows you to see where everyone lives in proximity to each other and how small this little town really is.

It also allows you to fly around pretty quickly too. There is a fast travel system in place for the exceptionally lazy which basically allows you to bum around in Timmy's wheelchair, but I found myself only using this when it took me to a quest destination or the other side of the map completely. I guess it falls to what you are more impatient with: waiting for a load time to put you in place somewhere or the time it takes to actually traverse the world map.

The overall map is not huge, so expect a lot of back and forth.

The game wastes no time letting you know that you are in this universe because as soon as you finish punching in your name, Cartman deems your name "Douchebag" and everyone else refers to you as such regardless of what you put in for yourself. In typical Parker/Stone fashion the intent is to offend fast and often. So expect to hear the word Fuck about as often as you read it in this blog (actually, probably a lot more).

After you have created and named your character you will get to pick your job class between Fighter, Mage, Thief, and Jew. As you scroll through the options you will of course be getting color commentary from Cartman heckling you for whatever it is you are thinking about (and naturally picking Jew gives you the worst of it). These basically give you your specialized abilities for the game, otherwise the customization between the 4 job classes is generally the same. For the sake of my play through I just went fighter because I was Redboxing my game and wanted to tear through it.

"White Fighter huh? Don't see many of those all to often." - Eric Cartman

The game plays an interesting blend of homage to the show while still producing a new narrative in their style of humor. Many of the characters you meet and the places you will go all have some bit of dialog or story that throws back to something you might have seen from an episode. But as you play through the game there will be lots of subtle jabs (and a lot of the time not so subtle jabs) at various things in the game industry or other titles outright.

For example, I would say one of the games that is most heavily influenced as I played along would have to be Skyrim. Much of the score of the game mimics the boisterous Nordic sounding theme of Skyrim in its own South Parkian way, and there are a handful of times where your character is referred to as the Dragonborn. There are also handful of songs that don't directly rip off but sound very similar to the Skyrim world maps and various situational themes would occur as I played through.

Opening a characters closet treats you to a compilation of call backs to that characters
various show shenanigans. The only one you can't open is Stan's, and you know why that is.

But there are also jabs at just things people take for granted in games. For example: anything you can open is usually marked with a yellow handle and for the most part opening things rewards you with some crappy item (with humorous flavor text), things you can sell, or at best things you can use to customize your character. But a lot of times you will just be invading someones house, and the game will let you know are being a creep. I have walked in on a lady standing in the nude followed by a shriek and a door slam, a guy jacking it on his couch before he slammed the door on me, and two Canadians just going at it on their bed (they yelled at me, but it didn't stop them).

There is also a section where you pick up audio logs, and as you pick them up they get progressively more angry at the fact that audio logs are always pointless, and why do people take the time to record them when they could be escaping? They also make a number of other cracks at other games too, so it's not just a rehashing of the jokes from the show. A good deal of them were pretty funny and much like watching the show I was pretty much glued to the script to see what they were going to say next.

Naturally though, the humor coming from the minds of South Park is guaranteed to push boundaries and offend some people. Sure enough, that is exactly what happened as both Europe and Australia censored specific parts of the game. As Parker and Stone are very much against censorship, the EU and AU versions of the game make sure to voice their displeasure about the overreaching censoring government.

By game end you will be playing on both sides of the war, so all of the major kid characters will be on your team at some point. As the story progresses the villains will change, but I hesitate to call this a deep game. It's overall playtime can be finished in about 10 hours if you make a habit of skipping the side quests. I gave them a relatively fair amount of attention and I managed to tear through the game in about 15 or so hours, but I was making the push to finish it so I could be done with it in a 1 day check out. It took me two.

The game itself plays in the same vein of JRPG that Mario Superstars or Paper Mario falls into, where the team basically consists of yourself and one of the other major characters. When in combat you get a wheel of options from your basic melee and ranged attacks, special abilities, "magic" (basically ripping ass on people), and other options. When you go to attack you are given indications or quick time events to maximize the damage potential, usually a little flash for you to hit a button for your critical, unless promoted by another QTE. This also applies to defense as well as you will have a quick indicator for a block, and if you block the whole combo you will have a chance for small retaliation damage.

Along the map, you will find open flames you can "Dragon Shout" at (read: Fart)
which will blow open  new paths, or take out enemies without having to fight them.

But it does do something interesting with the battle system. While each character gets a turn, there is sort of a prep turn that you get prior to your attack. When you or your partner's turn comes up, you have the option to use a healing/buffing item or special ability, and then if you haven't made an offensive attack yet, you are then able to do so. I found this actually to be pretty cool, once I realized it. If you get speed potions (coffee) it basically allows you an extra turn right at the start of fight. So you can get a free debuff or two attacks.

And MAN, debuffs are important in this game. In addition to enemy hit points, there is also an armor level that soaks a portion of the damage you do, and if they are wearing some kind of armor or shield, that needs to be dealt with as well in order to really start putting the hurt on people. There was a specific boss fight in the middle of the game where you are fighting against Al Gore and some members of the secret service where the fight starts off pretty even, but when the secret service comes out the defensive buffs they get are just retarded. The fight took me close to 10 attempts before I managed to stumble on the right set of debuffs to weaken them down. So don't ignore debuffing your foes.

With the exception of boss fights, you can also pull up a series of summoned characters to use to basically insta-kill all the enemies on the screen. You can only use each of them once per day, and only if you completed the respective side quests for that character. Jesus is pretty easy to get as he just involves talking Father Maxie twice and then finding Jesus in the Church. Getting Mr. Tuong Lu Kim from City Wok (one of my favorite characters) involves clearing out a small tower, and Mr. Hankey was probably the hardest since you had to scour the South Park sewers for his 3 children. If a fight is too hard, use these because saving them for a bigger fight tends to render them useless.

Because the game itself is so short, it has an incredibly low level cap, once you hit level 15 you have pretty much maxed out your character. You won't be able to learn everything but that actually does allow you a degree of customization depending on what type of character you were building. I actually went with a pretty safe selection of stats during the course of the game, and I'm curious to learn how that might change things if I had picked different job classes.

Sometimes summon's that attack one person will still scare of the others.

There are also a pretty good degree of side missions and collectibles throughout the game as well as some pretty raunchy and ridiculous achievements. But more than anything it's a fun ripple for a fan of the South Park universe who really wants to know more about it. As someone who has followed the show for a long time it was nice to travel all round the town and revisit old locations, see nods to things all the way back in season one, and see nearly every character to grace the series get a small spot in the sun as you play.

Can it carry for multiple play thoughs? That I am not so sure about. Like any good episode of any show, the jokes lose a lot of their steam once you already know the punch lines and I would image that would be much of the same case here. The story allows you to make some different decisions as you play through and I think that would affect the story somewhat but overall I don't think that they would have a massive impact to the game. I think because of the game's relative shortness you could probably get through two play throughs with relative ease but after that it will probably lose steam.

Kyle's most powerful move is practically game breaking. Even if you mess up
the quick time event with it, it still does enough damage to beat everyone.

If you are a fan of JRPG style games, you will probably find this game to be an entertaining but somewhat lacking experience. If you are a fan of South Park in general, it does everything it needs to satisfy your needs as a fan of the franchise. Honestly the only people I would think of who wouldn't like this game are people who are easily offended by the show, but then again, I highly doubt those people would ever pick this game up in the first place.

There isn't a lot this game brings to the table, but what it does it does well. The gameplay is fun, the music is fitting for the theme, the humor and design are spot on. Sure the storyline isn't exactly groundbreaking, but for telling a South Park it does exactly what its supposed to. Yeah there are a handful of glitching issues and its really short, but thats good for a game carried on humor. It means it doesn't overstay its welcome.

I had a lot of fun with this game, and if I had more time with it I would probably still be playing it. I am still pretty sketchy about that 60$ price tag. I've certainly payed more for games with shorter campaigns but something about the price tag still sticks in my craw. I personally would wait for a 20 or 30$ price point but make no mistake about it, after 17 years of the series, we finally have a good South Park game.

How do I go to Canada and no run across Scott the Dick?
For shame South Park, I was let down.