The game is successful in setting up the premises for the story early on, leaving you with a clear cut goal that evolves through the story- arch. This story becomes the framework, sceleton on which major themes are slowly buildt. One gets the feeling that the story simultainiously evolves and unfolds, as you are presented with tidbits of information of both past, and your direction ahead. I'm telling you bluntly to look for these themes, not because they are not well presented, but because such complicated and intricate storytelling has hitherto remained unseen in the gaming world.
Whilst other games have managed successfully to tell a story through emotions (Fumito Ueda games and ThatGameCompany) and others have told it through dialogue and story (Hideo Kojima and Final Fantasy) Red Dead Redemption juggles both of these extremely well.
This achievement is even greates because of the game's open world structure, making pacing the story more difficult.
It shows that Rockstar has clearly learned the hard earned lessons of open world game- design. A constant dilemma when making a huge open world is, how do simultainiously portray it's scale, and not bore the players with hours of traveling time. Too easy teleportation would hamper ones feeling of scale, while long trodges through boring landscape can be a game- killer. Red Dead Redemption elegantly solves this by filling travel- time with interesting dialogue or voluntary side- missions. Teleportation also comes in two forms. One is just plain wooshing over, but the other one is taking a mail- coach from city to city. The fairs are reasonable, and you had the option of either letting the world pass by as a beautiful screen saver, or skipping the whole ordeal. I frequently chose the former, treasuring the in game pauses for what they were, and in the mean time making my- self a bit of coffee.
There was clearly a danger of "been- there, done that", with this being the second Rockstar game on virtually the same engine, but RRD delivers a whole nother experience than Grand Theft Auto IV. While the latter seems to have aimed to go over the top with weapons and cars, RRD has had more constraints and masterfully played it's cards too eek out every scenario of the weaponry of the time, without overusing any of the elements. Several of the game's assets were only used one time, before we moved on to new and exiting things.
A good game is a game that knows it's place, clearly difines it's core area of concern and does that well. Excellent game is a game that does this, and in addition excells at every part of the game parts from music, to animation and script. Red Dead Redemption is simply, and excellent game.
