 SISTER LOCATION REVIEW aka. FNAF FROM THE ADULT PERSPECTIVE - THINGS JUMP THE SHARK |
  FNaF Sister Location was released in early 2016, right on the heels of FNaF World. It was the fifth installment, and was a real departure from the FNaF we all knew and loved, and really where I feel the series (and the lore) jumped the shark.
To understand it, when FNaF started, it was just a simple little game based on the kind of things my childhood school bus on the way home from Chuck E Cheese in daycamp stories would have been based on. A simple premise, a little retro-80's, carefully crafted to instill fear even in a 30 year old seasoned gamer who considers "Call of Duty" just another day without any real fear to be had. Basically put, kids died, the killer put them in the animatronics suits, now the robots roam the resturant out for revenge. Good, simple, and scary. But now comes my critique of Gen Y and Gen Z a bit. I'm what you call a Xennial - I'm that weird world between Gen X and Millennial - just old enough to remember when things were analog, you had landline phones, TV antennas, computers were for work, and video games were kids, but just young enough to understand the concepts of a modern world well enough to fit into it almost seamlessly. One particular bone I have to pick with Gen Y and Gen Z, is how they can't seem to stand any sort of mystique to anything anymore. Everything has to be exaplained, meticulously, with every last detail accounted for, even if it's not solving a problem or doing anything of any actual consequence. That ruins the horror in horror, it ruins the mystery that makes a plotline interesting, and turns it into a near joke. This is what I feel happened with FNaF with Sister Location. We went from the simple premise of a Chuck E. Cheese/Showbiz ripoff with some simple child murders and abductions leading to hauntings of the animatronics, to now a story about a zombie british man with purple skin in a disused springlock rabbit suit, creating a underground bunker full of advanced animatronics designed to suck small children into their bellies so he can kill them and smelt the "remant" from them to hopefully revive his dead daughter and the son his older son murdered by stuffing him in the mouth of a Fredbear animatronic in the previous game's minigames. I never really liked Sister Location that much, the gameplay was fun, but the plot is where I feel FNaF Jumped the shark. FNaF World was a fun excursion that could fit in the universe as it's own corrupted video game, but Sister Location just felt like trying to explain too much and introduce too many elements. I also feel it was a bit of an excuse to use a lot of Vaporwave/Retrowave livery with the animatronics, rather than leave em' like we would expect to see in 1980-1995.THE HISTORY OF FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S PART V: COMPLICATED FNaF: Siser Location, was released to much fanfare and praise when it came out, for changing up the game story a bit, but it also convoluted the lore even more, and that's what seemed to rile the community up the most. Like I said, we went from a simple story about animatronics haunted by dead children in a rip-off entertainment resturant, to a story about a presumably British child murderer who created his own underground railroad of suffering for his mechanical AI torture devices, and a huge story so stretched it felt unbelievable. People were also still reeling from FNaF World, which I felt was a fun, and cute little spinoff game that put the characters in a new and interesting context personally, as I'm a fan of Dragon Quest. But others took it as the series jumpting the shark because Scott decided to make a cute game. The reason Scott chose to do that was because, as the series got bigger, and marchandising started adding child-things like plushies, posable dolls with exchangable limbs, and Lego sets, there was a whole new demographic of Freddy Fans, and those were imposing HELL on me any time I brought the series up as a nearing middle-aged man. Literally, we had an African friend who looked at me nearly sideways when I realized his kids were playing with a Chica plushie.....I might as well have broke a smile with my lips sucked in like a creepo. Maybe the only tiem I ever felt my generation was more mature than me. Sister Location anyway, was by the time a lot of the older fanbase was moving on to things like Undertale, Roblox, and Minecraft. I was moving back to my comfortable world of DOS games and NES and Atari games. Even I was getting tired of it, it just was not the same "vibe" the series originally had. PLOT: 8/10GRAPHICS: 9/10 SOUND: 8/10 GAMEPLAY: 7.5/10 OVERALL |
