The myth of society, the inherent cruelty of people, the hypocrisy of treating predatory capitalists as a more civilized class—every warmed-over western theme is presented here without an ounce of subtlety and conveyed in the broadest possible strokes. Questioning the myth of the western is, at this point, almost as old as the base mythologizing that the genre did for so long, which leaves nothing unique to the game’s genre introspection. Red Dead Redemption 2 is the most ambitious game Rockstar has put out, in how it wants to be about something as much as the scope of its open world, but its aspirations don’t go much further than transplanting the themes of better westerns into an incredibly long video game, where you don’t ruminate on those themes so much as bump into them every once in a while on a mission.
This whole Western 101 approach unsurprisingly comes with a ham-fisted grasp of politics. A woman eventually puts on a pair of pants, one character explains white privilege and why the people in the “southern” end of the map look at him funny, another says that Native Americans were—in what is at least acknowledged as being grossly reductive—“treated poorly,” and everyone generally contemplates the horrors of racism and the aftermath of slavery. And for hours upon hours, none of this injustice is explored in any real detail.
These detours into attempted social consciousness suffer from a similarly ridiculous into-the-camera bluntness before they’re pushed to the fringes of the larger story. It often feels as if Red Dead Redemption 2 is merely parroting what’s expected to be said when portraying such things, to show that the game at least recognizes what it’s portraying, so that it may sufficiently get away with rendering a town where the black folks live on the outskirts or having one character accuse another of fucking slaves. Prejudice is given no more focus than as period-appropriate flavor, a patronizing tourism meant most of all to inform the myth of the white outlaw in a hypocritical society; at one point, Arthur makes a laughable statement to some Native American characters that goes something like, “The government don’t like me any more than they like you, and like you, my time here is nearly finished.” After all, if the white outlaw can no longer be free, then who truly is?
Originally Posted by Rudy
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Among both there are only 3 reviews under 90. 
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