On May 17th, 2011, Rockstar Games and Team Bondi released a game for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. In fall of that year, a complete edition was released, which also saw it's PC port. (And not too long after this original blog entry, the game was given a port to the Nintendo Switch, where it shockingly looks as good as it did before, as well as VR support for the PC port which I never tried) That game, L.A. Noire, promised to be a detective story unlike video games have ever told. A new type of facial recognition technology had been used for the game, one that captured a face to near life-like proportions. You would have to actually watch a real human face when they told you something important, and you would have to decide if they were flat-out lying, holding something back, or telling you the honest truth. When I saw the trailer for the game, I was excited for everything they promised.
http://www.rockstargames.com/lanoire/screens/album/1851/9481/
My previous experience with Rockstar games was with Red Dead Redemption, their now classic western deconstruction. I knew Rockstar were utter geniuses with character and story, and their graphics and gameplay weren't anything to sneeze at by this point. I knew they would deliver on their promise of a fantastic detective game.
One thing I specifically remember being excited for was that protagonist Cole Phelps would be a far more heroic character than the norm for Rockstar. My least favorite part of Red Dead Redemption was the fact you could still go on a shooting spree should you see fit; as it betrayed the character growth of former-outlaw-just-trying-to-get-his-family-back John Marston. The completely immoral characters found in Grand Theft Auto could barely get away with an understandable reason for a completely player-controlled feat, and the complete removal of the feature made me happy.
Remember that in just a short bit.
I got the game either the day it came out, or just after. I didn't pre-order the game but I did immediately head out to give them my sixty dollars, not willing to wait a few months for a price-drop. Something I only do for Rockstar games and RPGs, for the record. From my first few minutes of the game (disregarding my inexperience with the controllers leading to me running over a streetlight being literally the first thing I did), I was hooked, it was already proving to be everything I wanted it to be.
I loved Cole Phelps, I loved solving crimes, I loved the setting of a noir 1940's. I remember thinking the only thing that could have been better was if the game let me play it in black-and-white. A quick search through the options resulted in me finding out that I could indeed play the entire game in black-and-white, and I did.
Halfway through that first playthrough, the very thing I didn't want somehow ended up bugging me. I ended up missing the carnage I could ensue from Red Dead Redemption. Normally I don't care for doing such things, but when I play a Rockstar game, and they let me, I do realize I am bored of being the greatest and most heroic person in that games world, and I fall into the murderous sprees that almost everyone who plays these games eventually do. L.A. Noire felt so much like the Rockstar game that it was, that my brain rewired itself to try and convince me the game needed to let me do anything. This proved fruitless and the game was so hard-wired into keeping Phelps an honest and good cop that even if you tried running over a pedestrian, they manage to evade your vehicle roughly eight or nine times out of ten.
After my first playthrough, I went back to the missions so I could get one hundred percent on every single case, and I also went out of my way to find every single collectible.
http://www.rockstargames.com/lanoire/screens/album/1881/6601/
The man being questioned above is from the prologue, meaning the game outright tells you the answers to what you need to do for everything he says. You will wish the game was that easy when you try to get one-hundred percent, while not every performance is exactly subtle in the correct answer, making sure you have the right evidence to back up a claim can be an easy miss that sets back the entire chapter. The game is supposed to be hard like that, and it achieves it. I did in fact complete the game but I don't remotely remember a third of the correct choices.
The mentioned collectibles were even more of a nightmare. The golden film reels were easy to find with an online guide, and the street crimes you need to stop show up on your map whenever you are not in story mode and driving to them will activate them without the phonecall that the story version requires beforehand, but the cars were almost impossible from sheer annoyance. Some only showed up in one place, meaning a guide was usable. Others just happened to maybe spawn with an NPC riding in them, which meant you'd have to commandeer them, claiming a police emergency. So many cars looked so alike that it took ages to get them all, and you gained no reward outside of and achievement.
My first playthrough and a half tainted my opinion.
Thankfully, it didn't taint my final opinion. I decided to play the game again one more time. Without bothering to get everything, willing to mess up without restarting the chapter. Just actually play the game for what it was.
The game was not Grand Theft Auto, Bully, or Red Dead Redemption. The collectibles were just something else to do if you wanted it. L.A. Noire was a well-written crime story with wonderful characters and the best facial recognition technology of the time. When I let the game be itself, I realized just how great it was.
http://www.rockstargames.com/lanoire/screens/album/1891/6471/
I believe the best way to discuss my second playthrough would be to mention the character in the above screen, wearing the pink suit on the far right. That is Cole Phelps's partner in the Vice cases, the bigoted and corrupt Roy Earle. I hated Roy the first time, and for all the right reasons. The man was a corrupt cop, doing anything for a dollar, along with easily going along with the harsh bigotry of 1940's America. He was meant to be hated, and it worked. Then I listened to him a little more the second time. During one of the cases, Roy and Phelps discussed corruption, as it dealt with the case. Phelps, good boy at heart that he was, showed disgust and could not understand how anyone could sink so low.
Roy's reaction, surprised me.
Roy spoke like corruption was a terrible, lowdown thing, and he also outright stated that with the way to world worked, there was no other way to do anything. So much of Roy made sense to me, he almost garnered my sympathy out of it. He was no Archie Bunker, but I stopped seeing a man who was simply evil and spiteful, instead I saw somebody who well and truly believed he was a terrible person because the world only lets the terrible people get anything done. It did not redeem him, and it didn't need to, it simply gave me a surprisingly relatable layer to a character I originally didn't think he had or needed.
For those you don't know, Team Bondi (the other studio behind this game) has since closed it's doors. Despite loving this game, I sadly have to say it may have been deserved, as I've heard many terrible business practices, including towards Rockstar despite the latter studio being the only reason the game likely got it's final funding at all. We'll never see a sequel to this game, the technology is too expensive, and Bondi's original plan of the sequel adding full-body motion scan just as good as the facial would have made it even more so. Instead L.A. Noire sits in that pile of great games that are complete stand-alones in a vast ocean of games that for some reason needed a large franchise. I do highly recommend seeing just what I love about this game for yourselves. I played the 360 version, and I also own the complete version for the PC (and as edited in above I also have the remastered Switch port since this original posting), awaiting the day I finally get a high-end gaming computer so I can play the game in the way I truly believe would be best (although having it portable it fantastic as well).
I do still think it's worth completing, despite the time and effort, but L.A. Noire is a story experience and it's best to never forget that whilst playing.
Now here's a blooper reel made from the people behind the motion capture. They actually took real flubs and dully modeled them just for the sake of doing it, and in five minutes it really shows just how great the motion capture was. (Please note this version of video is uploaded by a fan, but the company hasn't released the footage themselves, and this is the best quality one. Should that change I will re-upload the official version)