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Editor's note: This is the final installment of Richard's epic diary of his time with Rockstar's Bully. While each entry stands on its own, read it from start to finish to discover one of the most thoroughly fascinating — and surprisingly touching — "reviews" of a game you'll ever come across. -Brett
It’s been nine days since my last confession (by confession I mean Game Diary, of course). I've had a tough week lost in assignments. But fear not, dear reader, I’m here now. And I’m ready to push on to the impending conclusion of Rockstar’s masterful boarding-school sandbox game, Bully.
11 April 2010
“It’s America! We go in with threats and bribes until we get what we want.” Yep, that's what Jimmy said when he found out the school had descended into anarchy, with no sign of the chaos ending. I've lost count of the number of lines of dialog that poke fun at societal and cultural norms in the United States. The cultural parody of earlier Grand Theft Auto games was completely outdone by Bully, even if it does miss several subcultures along the way.
Sure enough, the school looked like a war zone. Kids were running around throwing things and fighting each other. The cliques were destroying their most hated parts of the school — nerds torching the gym equipment, jocks trashing the library — and rioting endlessly. The only thing that held back the experience was the heavy toll all of this took on the frame rate. I encountered a lot of slowdown as I ran around the school from one building to the next.
Intentionally Clichéd
I don't want to get bogged down in the details, so I'll reduce a plot summary to the most relevant key elements: Jimmy (that's me) took out the school's social cliques one at a time by beating down their leaders. He told them to stop fighting each other, and began enjoying his elevation to "king of the school." But things immediately started to go wrong, and Jimmy took the blame. So he won over the "townies" while watching in disbelief as his kingdom crumbled. Then he realized that the school sociopath, Gary, was behind the problems.
It turns out that Gary was not just behind Jimmy's kingdom collapsing; he was also behind its construction. He took Jimmy for a ride, using him and everyone else as puppets for some ridiculous scheme about power. Or so he said, in a suitably cliché scene that saw me chase him up the outskirts of a tall building before we fought on a series of collapsing platforms. It's a reference to countless film and video game endings, and it's brilliantly executed, with Gary taunting you all the way. I found it interesting that the line that tipped Jimmy over the edge (literally and figuratively) into actually fighting Gary was an insult about Jimmy's mother — the very person who un-lovingly dumped him in this horrible school so she could go on a trip around the world with some creepy guy.
The mission concludes with a rather contrived happy ending, although I loved the cut to credits. Jimmy walks out of the school, saying in a voice-over that everything will be alright, to the cheers of the other characters, who are waiting at the bottom of the steps. Then Zoe, the girl responsible for that fantastic date in Game Diary #11, runs up and kisses him. Cue the credit roll. Fade to black. It isn’t exactly original, but it sure is fitting, and I enjoyed it immensely. Right down to the very end, Bully stuck to the film-parody style with which it begins.
The entire end-game mission was accompanied by more fantastic music. I am now of the opinion that Bully has one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in any video game. The music from Chapter 5 is particularly outstanding. It seems a shame that there wasn’t more variety in the soundtrack through the middle portions of the game, because going in to Chapter 5 it had been beginning to wear on me.
The Endless Summer
School is out…forever. I made it to the brilliantly conceived Endless Summer, which enables you to keep playing the game — completing the remaining side missions or just screwing around in the open world.
I felt it fitting that I go on one final rampage — attacking anything and everything (people or objects) until I got busted. When I eventually got caught, I was sent to the principal's office — for the eleventh time. This means I got to make one last trip to the punishment prefect, who gave me the standard "mow the lawn" task. Only this time I had to mow 80 percent of the football field — a time-consuming task that ate up around five minutes of real time. I'm really curious how much further the punishments can escalate. If anyone knows, please post in the comments.
Next, I went for a leisurely swim in the river. I soon found the shipwreck I visited at the start of the game — the place where I passed out from exhaustion for the very first time, then awoke to find my shoes gone while I remained dangling precipitously over the edge, much to my amazement. It was quite late when I found my way back there to take one final look. So it came as no surprise that, while I was taking pretty pictures of my surroundings, exhaustion set in. I passed out atop the ship for the second time, but sadly was nowhere near as incredulous as when it first happened. Because now I know: That’s just how people roll in the town of Bullworth. They’ll swim out to a shipwreck in the middle of nowhere in the pitch black darkness of the night, steal your shoes, and leave you for dead. It’s a fact of life — there’s nothing you or I can do about it.
I took one last try at English 4, which I was forced to attend after getting caught attacking little kids (they were bugging me, so I hit them with the slingshot). I could only manage a shameful 49 percent in the word jumble.
Final thoughts and statistics on page 2.
If you missed any of the previous installments, you can catch them at the links below.
Final Thoughts
And so it ends. A little more than a year after starting Bully, and roughly six-and-a-half weeks from the publishing of the first Game Diary, I finished Bully, the one and only open-world game set in and around a boarding school. The game is not without its problems — I think the controls are sub-par, the camera is occasionally frustrating, and the vehicles handle terribly. But I had an overwhelmingly positive experience. This is definitely a game worth checking out. Unfortunately, I can’t see it aging too well in the coming years. The older it gets, the more annoying its limitations will seem. And that’s a shame, because it offers an experience unique to its genre, which is consistently entertaining, fun, and brimming with cultural parody.
The Game Diary may return at some point in the future with a different formula and game, but I need to have a think about what would work best. There aren’t many games that have the right mix of story, emergent experience, and attention to detail that is needed.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading as much as I’ve enjoyed playing and writing. In the immortal words of Jimmy Hopkins, “Later, losers.”
Random quote of the day: “Your attention please: Jimmy is complete human trash.”
Statistics
These are by no means exhaustive. Rockstar offered a huge amount of statistics for players to sink into for this game. I pulled out the ones I felt were most interesting or appropriate to the story I’ve told.
Game Completion: 72.41%
Missions Completed: 74
Money Earned: $1358
Time Played: 26:14:18
Times Busted: 135
Times Passed Out: 6
Distance Travelled on Foot: 143.16 km
Distance Travelled on Lawnmower: 5.30 km
Hit by Car: 1
People Knocked Out: 440
Times Knocked Out: 151
Success vs Nerds: 89.23%
Success vs Bullies: 94.94%
Success vs Preps: 97.96%
Success vs Jocks: 96.84%
Success vs Townies: 95.35%
Rats Killed: 22
Kisses Received: 26
Bottoms Pinched: 5
Most Hostile Towards: Bullies
Greetings: 299
Taunts: 229
Trouble Points Accumulated: 231333
Called To The Principal’s Office: 11
Escaped From Authority Figures: 73
Classes Attended: 46
Classes Skipped: 236
Attendance: 16.31%
If you missed any of the previous installments, you can catch them at the links below.