Just under 17 years have passed since South Park began to scandalize the world and offer the most stark and satirical version of what it means to be a child in the
United States. Practicing a kind of guerrilla war of humor, the misadventures of a group of children in the isolated town of South Park were immediately characterized by the savagery of their proposals and the idea that everything seemed to be allowed to get hit the spectator.
Curiously, despite this fact, the series and its main characters still retain a certain innocence in their way of looking at the world and looking at adults that has remained valid from the beginning and that is one of the main columns in the that supports the whole.
As Trey Parker and Matt Stone have saidOn more than one occasion, despite all the political and social satire of the series, South Park is fundamentally about “children being children”, accepting the rules that children are “cruel bastards”.
The duo has not only managed to maintain a show as durable and demanding as South Park. His films are two: one from South Park and the other an impossible Team America, a movie starring plastic dolls turned into another monumental satire on different elements of American society -in its two extremes-. And if that were not enough, the creatives have also managed to produce
a successful play on Broadway: The Book of Mormon, another satirical piece without compassion for the religion it portrays. A successful career in which they have managed to put themselves against any big pressure group in American society, to the right, the left,
the center and beyond. With the Rod of Truth, Matt and Trey overcome another challenge in their careers: successfully driving a video game worthy of the name of South Park, taking advantage of the excellent base of a group like Obsidian,
The Rod of Truthborn therefore with two different priorities but necessarily united. On the one hand, it has the obligation to be authentically South Park,
and Stone and Parker have bet unequivocally on it, making it clear that in the corresponding part, it is a game of his from the beginning to the end. This is not the typical videogame license in which the creators stay in the distance or offering advice or general restrictions to the study. This is a project in which the creators have been
thoroughly involved, have written and dubbed the dialogues as they do in the series, have contributed ideas and have directed, as well as carry an important promotional weight – and have been a very active part in the negotiations once THQ closed its doors. The first thing we see at the beginning of the game are the logos of Ubisoft, from Obsidian,
Of course, has not been free of controversy from the censorship of its contents in consoles in Europe. It seems that the continental players are not prepared to see scenes with anal probes and other abrupt ones that fit into the South Park ecosystem without problems.
And it seems that PEGI has not had anything to do, but has been the decision of Ubisoft itself. At least the study has taken it with humor .
On the other hand, regardless of the license, ObsidianI had the obligation to create a solid RPG, not too dense but neither trivial, nor much less boring. Something that reflects the wild and wild spirit of a series in which almost everything has been valid throughout its history, and also accommodate the narrative and creative interests of the game. The studio also had the responsibility of designing all the subsystems necessary to sustain
the development of the plot, the combat system of combats, the missions, the development of characters … all those aspects that are part of the great puzzle that is a videogame and with those that South Park authors are not familiar with. And of course, the studio is also responsible for the graphics, a much more important – and difficult – aspect than it may seem.
