Yes telling is important, but developping a bond between two character during a random car trip with an 2 minutes exposition scene is just a bad exposition scene. Like both characters are here and "blablaba I'm a tragic character blablabla I got raped blablabla". Nothing is happening during the scene, it's just a car trip. The audience just get bored with that. Sure the informations will be given, but the way of delivering them is bad since the audience is like "Oh yeah that's tragic... I guess I'm not really listening".
I took a while to get around to this, but lol, what?
You weren't listening. She was "attacked", not raped. She is
not a rape victim. People
assume she was raped to make bad faith arguments about how edgy everything is, yet nonsensically ask for it to be displayed more gratuitously on screen. See also: complaining about Kat being a "damsel in distress" but wanting her torture at the hands of Mundus rendered on camera, because somehow actually seeing a woman in pain totally tracks with complaining about how bad it is that she's in distress at all, even though her being beaten on-screen wouldn't make her any more likely to save herself if the narrative already has that she doesn't (at that moment in time), it just means she gets beaten. Kat even has an "out" with her astral projection and wandering Limbo to escape her suffering and people still don't think that's enough.
You got bored with the dialogue and wanted more. You are not the whole audience. As I've said, it delivered the information it needed to, and similar "showing" scenes happened with Dante and his backstory that
you complained about. You're actually a poor representative of an audience, see above, me calling bull on your claims that this is what you want, you not saying anything to the contrary.
Again,
do you have some kind of fixation with seeing people actively be victimized before you begin to care about them, especially when it's child abuse? You need to take that up with God.
Another way to do a good exposition scene would be the reveal of Lady's motivation in DMC 3. The scene doesn't come from nowhere, Lady just witnessed that the man she chased for so long got killed by another and she basically has no other goal in her life. So having her spilling the beans to the only person with her isn't that random, especially given that she saw him before and he has been quite nice with her until now.
You thought that was good?
Here's how that exposition scene actually went down, with context.
Lady has tried to kill Dante twice now, once with an absently-fired shot from her rocket launcher, and another time by head-shotting him directly after he saved her life even though she had no plan to stop her own fall or any actual way to get down from where she stopped at (no, things happening in Offscreenville doesn't make it valid or sensible). So that's twice she tried killing him even before she found out he was a demon, much less done anything to prove himself immoral. Then she popped him in the mouth for good measure. So she was perfectly fine committing murder on her way to committing patricide, for no real reason than her characterization is boiled down to "Strong Female Character"/"psychotic tsundere with moe aesthetic". Dante wasn't necessarily nice with Lady either- -he flirted at her, complained at her, didn't make a real effort to put her on safe ground and flirted at her some more in response to an illogical request, left her stuck at the side of a tower as if that's any place for anyone to be, and made passes at her later on implying she'd ever want to date him. That's not something worth shooting a man in the head for, but that's what he got. They're both dumb.
She did not witness Arkham be killed. She saw his dead body and no one else around except one guy, and immediately accused the only other person there solely because of her prejudice, yet despite her prejudicial thought that Dante is a "demon" and he "knows nothing about family"-- and her opinion doesn't change in Mission 14, she restates it then too-- she spills her guts out about her family drama to someone that
she thinks doesn't care. Someone that
she already accuses of murdering her father. He didn't answer conclusively one way or the other but he gave the answer he did to rile her up, she took the bait (again, psychotic tsundere), started shooting him and threw a whole tantrum about how he stole her kill and how important Arkham was to her and her personal vengeance quest. And again, despite her prejudicial thought of Dante being a heartless, murderous demon that understands nothing about family, she lets him go and turns her back to him without any fear that he could murder her like the heartless, murderous demon that she already assumes he is.
She doesn't even know why he's in that tower. She already assumes he's against her (at least, not on the same moral alignment) and all he's said about himself is "
dysfunctional family, lol". She doesn't even know who Vergil is, much less the excuse Arkham gives later about him being deceived by Vergil. Dante gave her 0 reason to trust him with her backstory but she gave it to him because....?
That's it. I don't know how you missed it, or why you ignore it. She divulges her personal issue to some
random man she doesn't trust. She doesn't even know his name, hasn't given her own name to him, he hasn't earned her trust or shown he's on her side, nor has she shown she's on his side. They interact for about 15 minutes in the whole game and she spends most of it being racist and denying his ability to feel any emotions or empathy. She just tells her backstory to tell it even though she thinks he wouldn't understand, although to anyone with common sense, if he already doesn't care, her ranting to him about it won't
make him care, and a few missions later she still talks at him like he didn't change at all. She did it to hear the sound of her own voice? It was a vanity project?
She also divulges her personal issue in a way that fails to connect to him since it obscures the significance of her mother and places more emphasis on the fact that that random dead man is her father.
Try watching the scene or reading the script again- -the bond established by her rant is hers with Arkham as father-and-daughter, and she's betrayed because he turned out to be a bastard, not because her mother meant anything to her. Arkham gave Mary her name, Arkham read her bedtime stories. Kalina has done nothing except get a gun named after her, post-mortem. She's not even a person. Kalina Ann has no bond established in that exposition, and she could have been as likely Lady's mother as her step-mother or any woman that Arkham could marry; what she is (as explained to Dante) is "
Arkham's wife", not necessarily anything closer than that such as a
mother-and-child bond that should be there. Dante could've connected to that if he'd heard it that way, as he lost his own mother to demons. Eva was not just "Sparda's wife" to him, and he has never referred to her with such an impersonal term even to a stranger, see: Trish.
Lady more clearly mentions Kalina being her mother, not when Dante is there, but in scenes with Arkham, where it serves no purpose because Arkham has known Kalina longer than Lady has by default, and it still didn't stop him from murdering her in cold blood. He already devalued her life to that of any interchangeable woman and fodder for sacrifice in service of a man's greatness. Pulling familial rank on him means nothing. Even when he appeals to her before he dies, he exploits that he's her father, not whatever meaning Kalina has to either of them, because she doesn't have one except as the name of a weapon- -which isn't explained either, but Dante magically knows
that detail when he gets the weapon because the dialogue and scenarios were written with no concept of theory of mind.
What Lady says in Mission 10 doesn't even clear good
dialogue, much less good
exposition. But, hey, flashy fight scene!
The scene isn't just boring talk, it is actually a fight scene to keep the audience invested in it while the information is given. [...] That's a good exposition scene, far better than two teenagers talking during a car trip with nothing happening.
God, yeah, Reservoir Dogs and Unleashed were so damn boring because people talked in a car for a scene or two, and talking in a car about any given topic is inherently boring and invalidates the rest of the work. Don't they know the audience has a short attention span and needs wall-to-wall action?
Action games
especially don't need downtime or transition periods in cutscenes! It has to be show, show, show! A fight scene with exposition is inherently better than plain exposition, because fight scenes are good, therefore everything they're in is good, even if the exposition in the fight scene is poorly-constructed and low-quality in terms of what they're actually saying, doesn't make narrative sense, and is there to fill a cutscene quota between two characters that don't trust each other
nearly enough to get that personal! Not to mention one of them is a fantastic racist who still spills her emotions to a guy she's only known for
four and a half minutes before that and was homicidal to him for all of them, and then gets into a boss fight with him after less than
ten minutes of interaction, with all those scenes being mere minute-long intervals spaced out across hours with the same nonsense of "
you're a demon, you don't understand" being repeated over and over!
Who cares if the two teenagers talking in the car are having a conversation after one of them's saved the life of the other and helped that guy evade the cops, and they've actually
spent time together in other missions, having other conversations that aren't inherently antagonistic from one of them denying the humanity of the other just because she has a problem with how he was born? Who cares if the conversation served the purpose of having Dante affirm his allegiance to the Order, shows that Kat trusts Dante, shows how much Dante
wants to be trusted, and how much Vergil empowered Kat to kill her foster father (and thus, why
she is Ride or Die with the Order). They did that in a car, that makes it boooorriiiiinnnnngggg.
No wonder I took so long to reply to this.
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