4. Wooden Supporting Cast
For a game that so badly wants to be a movie, you would think that a lot of the focus would go on creating characters that grabbed your attention and kept you playing. But in Beyond: Two Souls, we are presented with one of the best collection of cliché characters, seen this side of a Resident Evil game. If its William Defoes caring/mad scientist routine, or Jodies melodramatic foster parents, or the good looking love interest with an edge; they all drag Beyond: Two Souls to depths that are only seen in American daytime soaps. There is nothing interesting about any of them and they all project their individual story arcs as soon as they make an appearance in the game, because they are all characters we have seen a thousand times before. Jodies on/off boyfriend, Ryan is the worst. Either through the choices you make or more likely due to bad writing, it is hard to gauge how he is going to behave from one scene to the next. You know he will be involved in the climax somehow but his journey there is a mess. He is introduced as a total jerk who then becomes Jodies boyfriend. He then manipulates Jodie, they break up but then come together for the boss fight at the end. Like the preverbal puppet Ryan is, he does only what each scene requires him to. Because there is no actual character development, all Ryan can do is play sexy boyfriend 101 or angry boyfriend 101 or CIA man 101. Bad acting combined with a terrible script, even Willem Defoe cant save the scenes he is in. His delivery is almost as dead as the eyes on his avatar.