South Park Guide

You walk around town, talk to your favorite characters from the shows, and get into lots of fights. This time around, the kids have cynically ditched their swords and spells in favor of a more lucrative genre: superheroes. You, playing as a customizable hero with your very own class and origin story, team up with Cartman (The Coon), Kyle (Human Kite), Craig (Super Craig), and a bunch of other kids who go to school by day and fight crime by night.But they’re playing pretend. Whether the children of South Park are waging war against malevolent sixth graders or crooked cops, they are governed by rules that they all agreed upon, with powers they invented. Kyle can soar into the sky and shoot laser beams. Craig can enrage enemies by flipping them off. And you, selecting between classes like Elementalist and Assassin, can use abilities ranging from the mundane (punching people in the face) to the outlandish (summoning a giant drone) and the supernatural (conjuring a prison of ice). You can only move a certain number of spots during combat, unless a car is coming, and everyone has to quickly relocate.

All of these characters have special combat animations for each attack, as does your main character. The power of your hero’s bum also returns, though this time has evolved to included time and space-bending systems. Rather than using your flatulence to dish damage, instead there are new abilities which can be used in and out of battle. In a fight, you can reverse time to undo an enemy turn, or pause it to dish out free hits outside of your turn. Complete a side quest and you can even summon a past version of yourself to join the fray. Between battles, you can use your hero’s ass to team up with allies to unlock new areas. Join the Human Kite to reach new heights, or fart in the face of Captain Diabetes to summon his unbridled Diabetic Rage to tip over blockades. There are others later in the game, some involving things lodged right up there, but I won’t spoil them here. Let’s just say the new systems make for far more entertaining exploration than in The Stick of Truth and leave it at that.

As the two squads of heroes compete to track down a missing cat and eventually unravel an elaborate plot involving racist cops, illicit drugs, adults behaving badly, mafia dons, time traveling farts, and the return of a mysterious villain from South Park’s past. What makes the story work, as usual, is the contrast between the naivety of the children and the horror of the events happening around them. To build up your franchise, you’ll wander around the town of South Park, engaging in menial tasks that feel like they would’ve been a punchline on the show. The Fractured But Whole, like many other Ubisoft games, barrages you with notifications about all the things you have to do and collect. You’re asked to go collect yaoi drawings of Tweek and Craig, hunt down cats for Big Gay Al, and do a number of other sidequests with no real reward other than the joy of exploring South Park. That may be reward enough for many fans, though it’s less fresh the second time around. At least the dialogue, written by Parker and Stone, stays entertaining throughout the game. The small battlefields and limited ability options don’t leave you with many interesting decisions in combat, but the writing and animation make up for any mechanical shallowness. Every battle is full of banter and what appears to be customized dialogue, based on the situation and your party makeup. As the game progresses, you unlock a total of 12 possible companions who can fight alongside you  up to three of those allies can join you in most battles  as well as nine possible power types for yourself. The imaginative powers on display run the comic book gamut, from cyborgs to raging muscled monsters.

There are special battles where you’re forced to keep moving or to move enemies into specific spots, others where you have to target one enemy among many, and other conditions that keep things from getting stale. That’s on top of the nuances of the basic system: because positioning matters and everybody’s ability set works differently for range, direction, knockback, and other special effects, there’s a fair amount of depth to it. And, by the end, you have more than a dozen distinct characters to choose from. Each has three abilities and an ultimate power (which uses a charge that’s shared by the whole team), and that gives you a wide range of options for any given fight. Token is a great tank who can swap places with an endangered ally and shield himself to take the hit, while Kyle plays better by maintaining distance and healing and shielding allies. Kenny, of course, has a much more suicidal playstyle. Between fights you’re free to explore the South Park streets, and in addition to all the gags and easily avoided fights with gangs of roaming enemies, they’re full of mostly simple puzzles that are a matter of pushing a button once you unlock the right friend with the right tool.Even those that are simple fetch quests will be better than those seen in other games, because they include the super South Park comedy. Rescuing Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Kittens is accompanied by Al messaging you on Coonstagram with something that’ll make you chuckle for every cat you save. Coonstagram, the new social media app within the game, acts as your ‘rep’ within the game, improved by taking selfies with the people of the town, and you can also see comments people share with each other and what is being said between people.

To build up your franchise, you’ll wander around the town of South Park, engaging in menial tasks that feel like they would’ve been a punchline on the show. Barrages you with notifications about all the things you have to do and collect. You’re asked to go collect yaoi drawings of Tweek and Craig, hunt down cats for Big Gay Al, and do a number of other sidequests with no real reward other than the joy of exploring South Park. That may be reward enough for many fans, though it’s less fresh the second time around. At least the dialogue, written by Parker and Stone, stays entertaining throughout the game. When you’re not exploring the town or watching cutscenes, you’ll be fighting. Fractured But Whole’s combat system takes the turn-based battles of Stick of Truth and adds a dash of strategy games like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. Rather than stand in one place and attack, you and your party will now fight enemies on a grid-based battlefield. Positioning is important. Some characters’ abilities can only damage enemies who are standing on neighboring tiles; other abilities will knock enemies back and forth across the battlefield. In addition to attacking and healing, you’ll always have to be thinking about where you’re standing.

The small battlefields and limited ability options don’t leave you with many interesting decisions in combat, but the writing and animation make up for any mechanical shallowness. Every battle is full of banter and what appears to be customized dialogue, based on the situation and your party makeup. Wendy, who steals the show as the whiz hacker superhero Call Girl, is full of compliments for her sometimes-boyfriend Stan (aka Toolshed). Team her up with Cartman, though, and the two will fire back and forth like the old rivals they are. Even lesser-known characters like Clyde (aka The Mosquito) have amusing exchanges with enemies. (“I didn’t know mosquitos could be so tough,” says one. “Yeah,” Clyde fires back. “Ever heard of the Zika virus?”)

This time, combat goes beyond the simpler, Paper Mario-style battling from last game. All battles take place on a grid of squares, usually five squares tall, and every character's powers blast out in a grid pattern of some sort—maybe horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or some weird pattern (like a bomb dropped a short distance away). The new kid can pick from a ton of melee and ranged abilities to create your dream mix of attacks and heals, though you can only have three normal attacks and one "super" attack equipped at any time. The rest of your functional variety will have to come from whichever other friends you have at your side. How you arrange your characters matters, since certain moves only work horizontally or vertically, while others push foes or pull friends. And since characters can only move so many squares each turn and can get in each other's way, you'll have to think a few moves ahead in some of the harder battles. The new kid eventually unlocks time-manipulation moves, as well, and these cancel out one enemy maneuver every four or five turns.