n October 2017, overloaded with interesting titles and masterpieces, South Park: Scontri Di-retti managed to catch the attention of the fans of the TV series of the same name and the video game developed by Obisidian a few years ago.
The Stick of Truth set a very high standard for tie-in videogames because, in addition to being a good RPG, he laughed out loud from start to finish at a time when you count too much the frames per second, forgetting a simple truth : games must above all entertain us.
And laughing we forget the Spartan graphics, but so loyal to the original animated series, or what works less at the level of gameplay, because basically South Park has always told us something important, even between fart and bad words.
Well, maybe not always always, but often . The Clashes therefore had to face a double challenge. The new videogame, developed this time by Ubisoft San Francisco with the collaboration of the official screenwriters Matt Stone and Trey Parker, had to prove to be a better sequel and had to have fun as an episode of the television series. If you have succeeded, you will find out in the next lines.
THE PROCYON CIVIL WAR
Clashes Di-retti begins as The Stick of Truth: the children of South Park are engaged in an epic battle of cosplay, but Eric Cartman has changed his mind and, quit the role of the magician played in the previous game, he returned to dress those of the Procyon , his masked alter ego. For those who do not know, almost every child of the charming town of Colorado is actually a super hero: it
all started in an old episode of 2009 (“The Procyon”) and then, with the passing of time, virtually every character has acquired powers going and coming.It is difficult to place South Park’s superheroistic vicissitudes in an official mythology, because these are deliberately exaggerated episodes that usually make fun of the Marvel or DC Comics franchises.
This is what happens in Clash of Laws, as Cartman intends to find a lost cat and invest the lean reward in the cinematic serialization of his super adventures. Of course it makes no sense and here, in fact, the narrative infrastructure of Clashes Di-rectly makes a little misleading.
While in The Staff of Truth the children basically participated in a sort of Live Action RPG, in the new game they take the story a little too seriously, even coming to fight in a feud between the super group of the Procyon and that of the Friends of Freedom , aping the eternal rivalry between the aforementioned American publishing houses.
In the midst of this “civil war”, without excluding low blows, we are in the role of the Novellino arrived in South Park in the previous game. Clashes Di-retti is a real sequel but anyone can play it without first having to complete The Stick of Truth: in this sense, Stone and Parker have done a great job, writing sibillini references while playing with a very multi-faceted storyline.
But we must admit that the early hours of Clashes are a bit ‘sluggish, and almost seems to see all the problems that have postponed several times the launch of the game:
the plot remains long without a precise direction and develops into a succession of main and secondary missions almost completely unrelated to each other. The story gives the impression of being too intricate for what should be an interactive video game. Intent to introduce as many characters and references as possible to the television series,
Matt and Trey seem at some point to lose the thread of the speech and around five or six hours of play you have no idea what is happening:the Novellino passes from one problem to another, thanks to Morgan Freeman discovers the powers of his back and faces ignorant ringing, non-EU ninjas, pedophile priests and other amenities. At a certain point, however, something clicks.
It’s like a turning point. It almost seems that Matt and Trey decide to throw themselves headlong into the superhero storyline regardless of satire or moralism. Clashes Di-retti then becomes a compelling cinefumettone in which, by the end, each piece of the mosaic finds the right place, pushing the accelerator on an epic but exhilarating conclusion. South Park fans will probably love the quotes and how they relate their favorites on the screen, but we must admit that Clashes Di-retti is less funny than The Stick of Truth.
