For nearly two decades, South Park's creators have been working to a weekly production schedule. It's an inconceivable cadence that must raise stress and caffeine levels well beyond what medical professionals would endorse, but crucially it allows the show the agility to satirise events as they're happening in a way that most television can't. By contrast, South Park: The Fractured But Whole has been in development at Ubisoft San Francisco for over two years. Perhaps it's this fact, above all else, that best explains why it falls just faintly but consistently flat.
It's not simply that the game isn't topical. The well-recieved Stick of Truth spent five years in gestation, after all, and didn't feel at all lacking relevance or bite back in 2014. But The Stick of Truth had the advantage of going first. It was the vessel for every observational gag about gaming that had ever occurred to Matt Stone and Trey Parker up to that point, and on those terms it was a real pleasure. Familiar RPG design met naturally in the middle with the series' humour and made a cohesive whole. But with the jokes about gaming already made once before, and South Park's defining current affairs-based humour kept out of reach by game development's longer timespan, The Fractured But Whole can't help but miss the mark. It's a game that listlessly re-tells the same 'gaming be like' jokes as its predecessor, changing tack only to give 2015's hot button issues like gentrification a real roasting. Like the TV show did. In 2015.
What's all the more frustrating is that limp writing is the only real problem with The Fractured But Whole (other than that name, obviously). Elsewhere, Ubisoft San Francisco has done a commendable job expanding the turn-based combat system to incorporate multi-class character builds and place more emphasis on positioning party members effectively, broadly similar to Divinity: Original Sin 2's battle grids and even Disgaea's esoteric boxiness. It's a system that serves the new superhero theme well: you're once again the New Kid in town, only this time it's the town that's changed. On a whim Eric Cartman ditches the role-playing world the neighborhood kids have been playing in for his own comic franchise universe, Coon and Friends. Thus, the town of South Park changes from a nine-year-old's vision of Middle-Earth to a nine-year-old's vision of a crime-ridden metropolis, and the Archmage's Wands and Axes of Stopping are replaced by endearingly rubbish superhero abilities from the likes of Toolshed, Mosquito, Captain Diabetes, and The Amazing Butthole.
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