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Hello there, it’s time for your aesthetic Journal Page of the week! But first, let me reveal to you that a new episode of our dramatized playthrough retelling of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Sky is coming soon! If you have no clue what I’m talking about, the good EmeraldDM8 and I will be narrating our thrilling and emotionally intense adventures in the charming Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Sky, through dialogue, cutscenes, and comments. You, the readers, will be able to experience it all as our episodes are released ✨. To have an idea of what I’m talking about, have a look here.
With my fine commercial aside, let’s move on to my usual “Random things I’ve done this week that hopefully will become a topic of the Journal if planets align”. This week I finally finished Atelier Rorona and, without going for certain difficult endings, I admit it was far easier than I expected; don’t worry, I’ll cover it on the Journal soon! Once that was taken care of, I started the flashy and bizarre Rent a Hero no1, as it has just received a well-deserved English fan translation, and… it’s so peculiar and brilliant that it clearly deserves a spot on the Blisscast Journal, so I hope you’ll be looking forward to its Page.
Yet now, leave all these contemporary experiences behind, as the time has finally come to have a tour of the majestic and perilous Los Angeles of 40s Noir movies with L.A. Noire!
| L.A. Noire |
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This is an action-adventure title with detective elements published by Rockstar Games, set in the city of Los Angeles, precisely in 1947. It was first released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2011, then it was ported to Windows in the same year. Subsequently, it received a remaster in 2017, released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Unusually, we even received a VR edition, consisting of some of the game’s Missions fully recreated in Virtual Reality, both for PC and PlayStation 4, which I haven’t tried yet for various reasons. Moving back to the full title, I’ve played the Nintendo Switch version.
As the title suggests, this game is heavily inspired by Noir movies, borrowing their atmosphere, characters, themes, and even several missions! For this same reason, before continuing with the Page, I’d like to offer you a brief explanation of what these fabled Noir movies are.
“Film noir”, which is the French translation of “black movie”, which refers to a particular type of stylish Hollywood crime movie, generally made from the early 20s to the late 50s, typically set in American crowded cities such as New York and Los Angeles; they were largely filmed in black and white, even when technologies such as Technicolor (color in movies) became widely available. Unlike what their present popularity among certain film buffs would imply, they weren’t so well-known when they were produced, and only became popular several years after the genre stopped being active in movie production.
These movies generally cover stories of people who couldn’t be defined as entirely virtuous, either because they have a dark past, or because they intend to perform an act that is considered illegal or unbecoming. As you would expect, these characters never truly manage to do whatever was on their minds, and their story for the most part ends in tragedy, as they absolutely can’t be granted redemption for their nefarious deeds. They could be just civilians, or, more fittingly, criminals, and even corrupt police officers, such as the ones found in L.A. Noire.
In Noir movies, we primarily follow their adventures while committing a crime and tragically attempting to get away with it, all while immersed in a gloomy atmosphere; the sky is never too sunny, and the whole setting screams uneasiness, in an attempt to picture the darkness in the characters’ hearts. All of this is generally accompanied by jazz music, which was prominent at the time, an aspect being reprised by L.A. Noire.
Even though not many people expected it to happen, this film Noir aesthetic ended up in gaming as well, materializing in the gem known as L.A. Noire. Now, with this clarification out of the way, let’s finally investigate the gloomy story and characters of this incredible title!
The narration revolves around Detective Cole Phelps of LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) and his various partners, who are tasked with various missions and cases to solve in 40s Los Angeles, filled with secrets that should have been left alone. Phelps’s career will advance throughout the various “desks” of the LAPD, where he will be tasked to work on increasingly complex and dangerous cases; he’ll follow a specific order, it being “Traffic”, “Homicide”, “Vice”, and “Arson”.
At first, Phelps might seem quite distant from your usual Noir character, a fact that made me wary of the game at first, as I thought it was only Noir in the name. Fortunately, though, this gradually changes, as we are shown several scenes in his dark backstory, and, eventually, his “perfect police officer” facade will start to crumble before our eyes.
As I explained at the beginning of the Page, L.A. Noire mixes action-adventure elements, such as driving cars appropriate for the time and shooting and brawling with enemies, with investigation gameplay. The LAPD will appoint an assistant to Phelps, and it will be a different one for every “desk”; you’ll have to drive through Los Angeles streets along with these police officers to investigate each case you’re tasked with.
My favorite of them all is definitely the partner who gets assigned to you during the Vice investigations, Roy Earle; he never fails to land a witty line and is probably the most “Noir” character of the game. While, understandably, most fans hate him as, let’s face it, he is an utter b*st*rd, though this is a Noir game, and we knew what we signed for. He always had that unsettling look in his eyes, showing a glimpse of the darkness inside him, which made him fit perfectly inside the game; he’s one of the many reasons that made me enjoy Vice the most.
My second favorite comes from the Homicide desk, Rusty Galloway, who also kept throwing funny lines, but what’s most hilarious is that he even empathized with the suspects! If you assumed no one would understand you in those moments when you would rather dispose of someone who’s extremely annoying you, worry not, Rusty gets you and supports you. Probably. [of course, “don’t do this at home”]. He was so hilarious that it made the whole Homicide desk unsettlingly exhilarating as a result [make of it what you will], therefore I’d say that even the desk itself ranks second in the list.
Hilarious and unsettling characters aside, the most well-known investigation feature in this game is interrogations; in order to gather intel, Phelps will have to interrogate several people, both suspects and witnesses. What’s special about it, though, is that you’ll be able to tell if a person is lying or not by simply looking at their facial expressions; in order to achieve such precise details, developers used a technique especially made for the game, called MotionScan. This technique is able to record every facial expression of an actor, giving the resulting animations an incredible amount of depth and credibility; thanks to MotionScan, we can reasonably assume whether a person is lying, as we’ll see its signs on their face.
While interrogating someone, you’ll be able to either ask questions or judge the answers you are given, by deciding among three options, which were slightly changed in the Remastered version due to some criticism (they ended up being frequently unclear); they are “Truth” (which became Good Cop), “Doubt” (Bad Cop), and “Lie” (Accuse). Based on your performance, you’ll have a different amount of clues available, and your total mission rating will vary, and if you fail an interrogation, it might cause a game over.
Alongside interrogations, you will be able to explore your surroundings, picking up a multitude of objects, some of which will be required to solve the case. All these objects can be freely rotated and examined, and this reminded me of Shenmue, as in that game you can freely interact with almost any object you see; it’s immensely intriguing to be able to explore what was in these houses and understand how people lived. Even the rest of Los Angeles perfectly conveys this feeling, especially because it was thoroughly reconstructed thanks to pictures and movies of the time, and even features important locations from Noir movies! Luckily, the city is fully explorable in “free roam”, thus you can walk and drive around even when not on a mission, to wholly absorb the magic of this place. My favorite location was “The Blue Room Jazz Club”, where the recurring character Elsa Lichtmann usually sings; it felt like the perfect aesthetic place where these dark characters would have a drink, reflecting on whatever was happening in their lives at the time.
Yet, as I already implied before, in this game, Noir references go well beyond the mere aesthetic, as many famous plotlines, actors, and characters from the movies are reprised in a few missions, and some cases even take inspiration from real-life events of the time! A fine example would be Roy Earle himself, who is actually the protagonist of the movie “High Sierra”, played by Humphrey Bogart; and, to mention a case that is inspired by a movie, we can think of “The Naked City”, whose plotline follows the 1948 movie of the same name. If you’re interested in the many references found in this game, I recommend you read the L.A. Noire Fandom Wiki, where its curators did a phenomenal job of listing all the references they could find. It was wonderful being able to read these and discuss them with my dad, who just so happens to be a huge fan of Noir movies, and if he were still a gamer and had more time, I think he’d definitely adore L.A. Noire.
With this intriguing trivia aside, I reckon that I’d surely write numerous paragraphs beyond these ones, thus I’ll pause here, for now. Who knows, there might be future blogs and Pages about this game!
Reprising my usual manners, would I recommend this title to you? Understandably, if you are a fan of these movies, you’ll absolutely fall in love with L.A. Noire, and even if you just enjoy detective games, you’ll want to try this one; even if it can be quite dark, it knows how to counter that when it needs to, so don’t worry about that.
That said, I hope you enjoyed this Page, and I hope you’ll tag along for the next ones!
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| Sources: |
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| L.A. Noire Wiki – Game: > https://lanoire.fandom.com/wiki/L.A._Noire |
| Wikipedia – L.A. Noire: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Noire |
| Wikipedia – Film Noire: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir |
| L.A. Noire Wiki – MotionScan: > https://lanoire.fandom.com/wiki/MotionScan |
| IMDb – The Naked City: > https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040636/mediaviewer/rm1809917953?ref_=ttmi_mi_typ_pos_1 |
| IMDb – High Sierra: > https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033717/mediaviewer/rm2415988480/ |
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