The third and final episode off Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Michonne has finally released, bringing this miniseries to an end. Titled ‘What we Deserve’ , this finale looks to wrap up this spin-off story focusing on the machete wielding badass character Michonne in a big way. But can it rescue a series that for me so far has been disappointing and far too formulaic?
Sadly the first moments with Episode 3 highlighted so much that has annoyed me about this mini series as a ‘Previously on’ montage stuttered around reminding me of the big choices I had made along the way. As the clips took a few seconds to load the correct scene for my various decisions it failed to bring me back into the story in a way that made me look forward to seeing how the story would end but instead highlighted the issues that have plagued my time with it. I have simply just not connected with the Michonne character at all, or any of the other characters in the story so has left the experience all too flat to enjoy.
The episode opens with yet another opportunity to give Michonne a light hearted moment during a flashback to two weeks before the events in episode 1. Conversation choices for the player allow you to steer Michonne’s responses to Oak, which can either see Michonne being friendly or stern and distant. It was a nice moment to jump into the final part of the series and how you choose to respond will no doubt come from how you will Michonne would answer. It all feels a little forced though to try and give the machete wielding Walker killing bad ass Michonne some level of humanity and compassion when talking to the people around her.
Soon the story brings Michonne back to the situation at hand, still reeling from the attack of Randall which has led to a stand off and threat of retaliation from his sister Norma, and the theme of consequences that is threaded throughout the story finally comes to the surface as you decide how to try and find a solution. Just as Episode 2 was a baffling short episode as just 50 minutes long, “What We deserve” just about hits the one hour mark, and with achievements popping every few minutes with doing very little other than making some conversation choices not interacting with scenes enough to move them forward, the feeling that I was simply along for the ride instead of shaping the story sucked the last hope of this episode redeeming itself.
The very simple formula of The Walking Dead games has really been stretched too far now and Michonne suffers from the lack of trying to refresh that formula. The world is terrible, Walkers are dangerous, human survivors are struggling everyday and there are good survivors and bad survivors. Telling a story that just has the survivors fighting each other as the player is asked to make decisions that will make one character die instead of another and having conversations that always end up with the onscreen message that someone “will remember that” is all too stale now. For it to work the player has to connect with the main character(s) to care what happens but with Michonne it just failed to do that. It failed because I am no longer shocked or impacted by a gruesome death at the hands of the Walkers or surprised when the bad survivors betray you leading to a fight where characters die.
Michonne being haunted by her past became a tedious story mechanic by episode 2, so having it resolving itself as the big emotional ending for her was signposted from the very start. At this point every character has a troubled and horrible survivor story of loss and regret, we have had two full seasons and one DLC in 400 Days that have told many of them. This spinoff series focused on one of the more iconic and fan favourite characters in Michonne and tried to tell an untold story of her but it was lost in its delivery and lack of actually doing more than a few quick time event mini games and interacting with characters as forgettable as this series will be.
The Walking Dead: Michonne spin off miniseries in my opinion should never have been cut up into three episodes. The short length of episodes 2 and 3 were detrimental to the story telling and having completed three chapters in 15 minutes just snapped me right out of the story with doing little more than pressing a few buttons to serve as gameplay. The Walking Dead world has now seen three games and it is time TellTale tell a new story or at least try to refresh the now tired style of game set in it. Michonne’s story was dull, obvious and lacked any real big moments to make it stand out. If you are a fan of The Walking Dead games you will simply get more of the same but less puzzles and more impossible to mess up action scenes that even with the extra brutality fails to be memorable.
Really disappointed by this game experience, it felt as though TellTale simply did not try to do something new or different and with the framerates issues, stuttering in cutscenes, it needed more polish than simply cutting it into three parts and releasing in a fast track release schedule. Not sure I want to return to the Walking Dead universe another time, it has given all the game experiences it has to give and should be put to rest now.
