There were just a handful of times where a throwaway racial stereotype joke didn’t quite feel clever enough to justify the sensitive subject matter.įor pure shock-value firepower, nothing in The Fractured But Whole had me reeling quite as much as The Stick of Truth’s zombie Nazi fetuses. It’s nice that there’s some positivity there among the obliviously racist (The Coon, The Human Kite) and sexual jokes, and much of it is genuinely hilarious.
Jimmy, who walks with crutches, has super-speed powers, and the developmentally disabled Timmy’s Professor X-like mental abilities make him so overpowered you can’t play as him in battle. While it’s mostly absurd, the kids’ superhero fantasy is actually a little touching in places. This is South Park, so it’s not exactly constrained by realism, so it’s a bemusing question that’s constantly raised.
Then adults get involved, and you have to start wondering what’s really happening. You’ll have kids shooting lasers out of kites and teleporting one moment, then pausing the fight to let a car go by the next. With the exception of Professor Chaos’ anime super-move intro, we always see their costumes as makeshift cosplay cobbled together from tinfoil, Tupperware, and cardboard, but their powers are shown with brightly colored energy blasts and feats of superhuman strength and speed. It's hard to tell what's real and what's all in the kids' collective imagination.Įspecially in the opening hours, it’s hard to tell what’s supposed to be real and what’s all in the kids’ collective imagination – and The Fractured But Whole delights in blurring that line. Granted, The Fractured But Whole makes few new jokes of its own, preferring instead to riff off of fan-pleasing material as it’s adapted to game form, but it does it well – it even makes killing Kenny funny again. But after a few hours it spirals into signature South Park absurdity, and you’re fighting everything from Professor Chaos’ minions to Crab People.
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It’s a cynical take on childhood roleplaying, of course, because Cartman plans to use that cash to jumpstart the equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe based around his Batman-like Coon character and become rich off the movie and merchandising rights. The story starts somewhat slowly, with your custom-made New Kid and the boys transitioning abruptly from the final moments of The Stick of Truth’s fantasy-themed battles to a superhero-themed quest to find a missing cat for a $100 reward. And sure, there’s some significant irony in the Memberberries appearing in a game so heavily based on callbacks to South Park’s 20-year history, especially now being a reference to a year-old joke themselves, but I’m going to let that slide. Exploring its expanded map of South Park and its densely-packed references to the show is a treat for fans, even though it’s quite similar to what we saw in The Stick of Truth. The emulation of the crude animation style is spot-on, the voice acting is all completely authentic, and the writing quality is up to the high expectations. Like The Stick of Truth, The Fractured But Whole looks and sounds so much like the show that at a glance it could easily be mistaken for a 20-hour episode when you’re not in combat.
This one’s gags are focused more on parodying the superhero movie franchise craze than RPG mechanics, which makes it feel a little less novel, but this time its turn-based tactical combat is also deep enough to stand on its own. By a wide margin, South Park: The Fractured But Whole is the funniest roleplaying game since South Park: The Stick of Truth came out three years ago.