South Park: The Stick of Truth — A Fun Adventure with Bad RPG Quirks
Based off of the hit animated comedy, this RPG features quite a few positives related to its story and gameplay, but has quite a few underlying issues.
A Quiet, Little, Redneck, Podunk, Chaotic Mountain Town
Ah, South Park. Nowhere on basic cable will you find a more controversial, storied series. The creators of the show, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, have been able to keep the series afloat for 25 years, and in that time, we’ve also gotten movies, specials, and of course, games that explore and expand the world of the quiet little mountain town that the heroic and headstrong Stan Marsh, intelligent and tempermental Kyle Broflovski, bigoted and uncooth Eric Cartman, and the immortal and loyal Kenny McCormick live in.
Just a warning, this article may feature some insensitive content due to the show’s adult nature.
The premise is almost something out of a Stephen King book, with the four boys encountering paranormal, extraterrestrial, and comletely outlandish oddities as they live their daily lives. They come into contact with aliens, trend-setting crab people, Canadians who have a proficiency for making fart jokes, eccentric celebrities, religious figures (of both the profane and sacred varieties), and all manner of weird and unusual characters. Often in this show, events that take shape in the mountain town of South Park, Colorado lead to nationwide and sometimes global catastrophes, which are almost always in direct result of the involvement of the town’s children, their immature parents, or any of the town’s often dim-witted inhabitants. These calamities include, but aren’t limited to, Randy Marsh starting the COVID-19 pandemic, Cartman summoning the dark lord Cthulhu, Stan being revealed as the apparent reincarted soul of Scientology prophet L. Ron Hubbard, and the boys causing a horde of giant-sized guinea pigs to be unleashed upon the world. Being a satirical adult cartoon that pokes fun at everyone indiscriminantly, South Park has naturally pissed a few people off.
I started watching the show when I was in eighth grade, and started to fully appreciate it’s longetivity and breadth as I entered high school. The chaotic atmosphere had always made me enjoy it, and I often really liked the narrative choices it took. The entire “Imaginationland” series of episodes were particularly creative and I liked the way that Matt Stone and Trey Parker told stories. They were fun, hilarious, outlandish, and unapologetically cutting. As I got older and progressed through my high school years, I gradually got into the later seasons and grew with the show and the characters. I watched the show and the movie (South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut) religiously. Nowadays, I’ve pretty much watched the entire show. It’s firmly held a nostalgic place in my heart for years. There have definitely been jokes and episodes that have gone too far for me (the Indiana Jones episode being one of them), but overall I really love the franchise. Out of all the episodes of the show, my three favorites have to be “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerBalls”, “The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers”, and “Medicinal Fried Chicken”.
A Brief History of South Park and Video Games
From the show’s inception in 1997 leading all the way up until 2014, South Park didn’t have a good reputation with video games. In the late 90s and very early 2000s, there were several games in production based off the series, but many were cancelled. A platformer for the Game Boy Color, for example, was canned because of the handeled console’s target audience being centered more towards children rather than adults. There were a few South Park games that were released at the time, however, though most of them were critically and commercially unsuccessful. The first that came was a first-person shooter released for the Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Microsoft Windows that was simply called South Park. In the game, the player controls any of the four boys and must use snowballs, cow-launching artillery, death rays, and other weapions to defend the town from mutant turkeys, aliens, and other unconventional adversaries. The game was critically panned across all consoles and didn’t sell well. The next game, South Park: Chef’s Luv Shack, was a game show-style party game that actually used the show’s art style, which worked much better for it than the last game’s 3D style, but it was still met with negative reviews. The game featured trivia questions that had nothing to do with the show with occasional minigames interspersed between those game show-style sections. After that came South Park Rally, a kart racer that Matt Stone and Trey Parker were particularly displeased with. They hated that game so much they wanted to make their own game based on the series, one that truthfully reflected its bizarre and hysterical nature. There were plans to make a 3D action-adventure title that would let players explore the town of South Park, but it was cancelled midway through production.
After all of these failed attempts to make a good game based off the show, Matt and Trey decided to take matters into their own hands. Their big idea was to make a full-fledged South Park role-playing game that was a reflection of the RPGs that they grew up with in the late eighties and early nineties, such as EarthBound and the Final Fantasy series. The show’s co-creators wanted a game that used the show’s visual style of cardboard cutout figures. They wanted it to look exactly like a longform episode of the series. The game would furthermore have the modern sensibilities and systems of modern role-playing games like Fallout: New Vegas and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Having loved New Vegas (a game that’ll make an appearance on this blog in some form in the future), Parker and Stone contacted its developers, Obsidian Entertainment, and development on the game began. Because that style of the show took a long time for developers to work around putting in a game, and also due to production changes, buyouts, and rewrites, the game took several years to make and suffered many delays and pushbacks. Finally, after many years of hard work, South Park: The Stick of Truth was released in 2014 by Ubisoft, with development by Obsidian Entertainment. I picked the game up a few months after launch and loved it. It felt exactly like a season of the show, along with a few extra things that really elevated the game for me. After replaying it, though, I do have a few issues with it along with some positive viewpoints too.
Magic, Vibrator Swords, and Explosive Farts
South Park: The Stick of Truth is a turn-based role-playing game, playing pretty similarly to Paper Mario and its sequel, The Thousand Year Door. It also bares some resemblance to EarthBound, the Pokémon series and the Final Fantasy series. The game’s turn-based elements feature a companion system that lets the player fight alongside Butters, Stan, Kenny, Cartman, Jimmy, and Kyle. These companions have magic abilities and weapons of their own that can be used to take on enemies in a battle. Butters can turn into Professor Chaos and spin a roulette wheel to devestate the opposition, Jimmy can blow his massive horn and play the Brown Noise so that the entire opposing force will shit their pants, Kyle can kick his brother, Ike, at enemies and shout “KICK THE BABY!”, and Cartman can shoot explosive streams of flatulence out of his ass. These are but a few of the hilarious powers the companions have in the game.
Like the Paper Mario games (and Mother 3 to an extent), the turn-based fighting requires the player to complete additional analog actions after choosing what to do on their turn (i.e. pressing a button when their weapon flashes) in order to make attacks more effective. This makes the combat system more engaging than just using a standard turn-based format. Status ailments also play a major factor in this system, and it was awesome to see the different buffs and debuffs that could be inflicted on enemies. The player, companions, and opponents can get screwed, get pissed off, be slowed down by ice attacks, catch on fire, get grossed out, and experience all manner of status effects. What I don’t like is that these status ailments don’t carry outside of battle, which means that after you’ve beaten someone in a find, you’re rendered copletely cured. It’d make the game much harder if the player had to deal with status effects in between fights while you’re in the overworld. Magic in this game comes in two forms: class abilities and fart magic. Yes, you heard that right, fart magic. Firstly, your class is what decides the class magic you’ll be using throughout most of the game. Your character can chose from four classes at the game’s beginning: Fighter, Mage, Thief, and Jew. I chose the Mage class in my most recent playthrough, but didn’t find there to be too much of a difference in playstyle from the two earlier times I played this game. Fart magic is not exclusive to a class, and actually plays a big part in the game’s story. There are four farts that you can learn in this game: Dragonshout, Cup-A-Spell, Sneaky Squaker, and Nagasaki. Each of them expends Mana Points (MP), while class abilities expend Power Points. Items can be used to regain lost spell points from using spells, as well as Hit Points (HP) and other losses suffered during battle.
In this game, the player can customize their own character to a ridiculous degree. As said before, they can also choose their class, but there didn’t seem to be too much of a change for me across playthroughs depending on the classes I chose. In my first playthrough from years ago, I played as a Fighter, but in my most recent runthrough of the game, I played as a Mage. Sure, my class abilities were different, but it really didn’t change how I took down enemies in battle, even though it should. In class-based RPGs like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a Mage is going to feel different in playstyle than a Fighter, but it doesn’t in The Stick of Truth. Kind of a disappointment. Character customization, on the other hand, is pretty much handled flawlessly in this game. Players can choose their armor, armor dyes, weapons, wigs, hairstyles, glasses, facial hair, and flair overall. The character is a silent protagonist, which fits the game’s RPG aesthetic quite well. The only downside is that you can’t choose your character’s gender. You can only be a male character, which is lame to me. This is a feature that I think may have been fixed in the game’s sequel, The Fractured But Whole, but I’ve only played that game once and don’t really recall the experience. I’ll gladly be coreected for that in the replies if anyone wishes to do so. What Trey, Matt, and the devs would have done to make the customization even better would be to include genders, dialogue options, stat points, and stat point checks in the dialogue wheels. If this game were made that way — in the true spirit of the Fallout series and many tabletop role-playing games long before it — it’d be a standout title in the role-playing genre of video games.
Wizards, Elves, and Taco Bell’s Green Sauce
Now, we come to my biggest complaint with the game — its story. The story of South Park: The Stick of Truth is one of many twists, turns, and roundabouts, and it’s all handled perfectly from a narrative standpoint. The writing, as it always is for South Park, is top notch in this game. Trey and Matt don’t back down for a second in this crazy game. They pull absolutely no stops in making this game offensive, hilarious, and epic. It’s almost like a whole season of the show wrapped into a single entity, and fuck me if I’m not all for it. It’s set after the “Black Friday” saga, a series of episodes that aired before the game’s release. In that trilogy of episodes, the boys start a war over which next-gen consoles they all want to play together, all while pretending to be fantasy-based versions of themselves. The story of the game involves the New Kid, whom the player controls, who has recently moved into town and has befriend some of the boys in town. He is recruited by Cartman to join the human-led Kingdom of Kupa Keep, but soon must make a choice of allegience between the humans and the Drow Elves, who are led by Kyle. These two factions are currently at war, this time over an ancient relic known as the Stick of Truth, which allegedly gives the barer control over the universe. At the same time, the New Kid is tasked by Randy Marsh to uncover a secret government conspiracy surrounding an apparent new Taco Bell that is being constructed in town. Using the power of his farts, which are somehow linked to his strangely unknown past, the New Kid must discover the secret behind this new Taco Bell’s green goo, which has been turning denizens of the area into Nazi Zombies.
The story I’ve mentioned here is one that I think is written effectively, but I have some huge issues with it. It’s a largely linear campaign, and doesn’t feature many branching paths. This doesn’t fit the game’s RPG nature in the slightest, and for me that’s a real dissapointment. In fact, there’s only one pivotal choice that the character makes in the entire game, and it doesn’t even have that much to bare on the plot besides a few cutscenes. The choice involves deciding whether or not to represent the Drow Elves or the Kingdom of Kupa Keep, but the decision feels irrelevent for reasons I won’t mention here because of spoilers. It only changes a few cutscenes and quests around, and doesn’t have any stakes when it comes to the government/Taco Bell plot. In general, this choice is not handled effectively and instead only comes off as a distraction. The story structure still remains the same no matter which side you chose to fight with. As I’ve previously stated, the game would have been much better off with choices made by the player throughout, with a dialogue tree that the player can use to make those choices. Even several different branching story paths would have at least been nice. If a dialogue wheel with multiple different options were included, the game would feel much more like a classic RPG, and the playable character, who is already customizable to an insane degree, would feel even more personalized according to what each player wants. If Fallout: New Vegas and the Elder Scrolls series were able to accomplish this with a silent protagonist, so can The Stick of Truth. Apparently, Matt and Trey’s original script for this game was over five hundred pages, but because of buyouts and production changes, the game had to be whittled down significantly. I’m telling you, if this game had all the features I just mentioned along with all of the fantastic plot that the South Park writing team came up with, it’d be a masterpiece on the same level as the games it’s striving to emulate.
The overworld in this game is also very fun to explore, but a few of the problems I have with it involve the side quests. They feel very flat and also have no baring on the plot. They’re fun to experience, and I swear to God that the Al Gore boss fight had me in tears with how bullshit the difficulty spike was. Factions, though they are spread out throughout the town, are only featured in the main plot. They don’t have side quests that you have to complete so that you can gain favor with them and lose favor with other factions. They don’t feel nearly as fleshed out as they can be in other RPGs, because the factions aren’t really factions here. They’re just distractions used to pad out the plot. You probably notice a running theme here with the plot, huh?
The Short End of the Stick
The Stick of Truth, and South Park as a whole for that matter, have a very defined audience. If you don’t want to get into the series, you probably won’t like this game. It’s a fun adventure for fans of the franchise, but outside of that, it’s not an RPG worth looking into, even if you enjoy the genre. The game has the writing on the level of Fallout: New Vegas and The Elder Scrolls, but the overall experience is hindered by a linear story that doesn’t suit the game’s genre and character customization that, while very idiosyncratic and well-defined, doesn’t seek its true potential. Furthermore, the combat and overall gameplay, while fun, can get a little repetitive towards the end. The game is also far too easy, and the dificulty spikes that are spread throughout the experience make fights feel terribly unbalanced. By the end, the developers aren’t even trying to make fights interesting. The last few battles are essentially a boss rush where you fight the last few bosses several times in a row. It’s annoying, and could be handled much better. I honestly by the end of the experience expected more from Obsidian, but didn’t find the game too towed down by the sum of its dull parts. It had a good story, and had mostly fun gameplay, but the developers failed to make the game reach its true potential. It could’ve been up there with the great RPGs for me, but it stopped short. Maybe we can eventually talk about a role-playing game that really hit its stride.
