 I know that I'm late to the party here, but I finally finished the final season of Telltale's The Walking Dead. I admittedly was late to finishing the game due to the fear that when Telltale shut down, that this season wouldn't be actually completed, and it almost wasn't. This was until Robert Kirkman's company Skybat Entertainment thankfully stepped in and helped complete the final two episodes as well as the series. So I finally decided to get around to finishing the game and, well, least to say, this season was a major step up from the previous letdown that was The New Frontier. I admit I didn't mind The New Frontier, but the writing and the characters felt a lot like the television show, and by that I mean it was dumb. I was a big fan of the first season of the show, but after that I found the characters' actions, motivations, and above all, goddamn common sense to be just ridiculous. Most importantly, it didn't have the tone and the feel of the comics. This, however, came across very well in the Telltale series. I'll be honest, I didn't know who Telltale games were before the first episode of this game came out. I never heard of the concept of games being released episodically. Obviously, this game would take Telltale from the small little studio it used to be to a near-on AAA-sized studio, until, well, you know what happened. Now I could sit and talk about the poor business decisions, too many projects and not enough development, dragging a deadbeat engine on longer than Call of Duty carried the quake engine, the internal staff controversies, and so on, but there are other videos out there that cover this problem far better than I could. So instead, I'm gonna take a little personal walk down Walker Lane through this series, and how I am pleasantly surprised that it ended on a good note. I was a really big fan of this series in the beginning, and the company itself. Aside from the Minecraft stories, which, really, why? I bought every Telltale game that was released during their rise. Some, obviously, were better than others, but for the most part, they had some great stories. I even went to several Telltale-related panels at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle over the years, the first being the Walking Dead panel back in 2012, just after they had released the second episode of the first season. I recorded a small bit of that panel as well. That's also where I got this sick poster. I attended a few other Telltale-related panels, like Episodic Games, Divine Dream, our never-ending nightmare in 2014, as well as the big cast meetup in 2018, where I got almost all the main actors, excluding Dave Fiona, to sign that same poster I got. So at least to say, I was a fan of these guys and what they did. The first season of the game was a simple concept in terms of gameplay. It was the choices and how they affected the story that was the key selling point, obviously. How the dialogue and the decisions choices were presented really made everything you choose to do as Lee have real weight and consequences. By the way, I know this has already been said a ton, but you have to give it to voice actor Dave Fiona for making Lee the best criminal turned reformed hero guy you would ever want at the zombie apocalypse. The guy was technically only in one season playable anyways, yet his words and his lessons have stuck with you throughout the entire series. As I said earlier though, this season captured more of the tone, the grit, and the atmosphere of the comics than the show ever did in my opinion. People didn't die because of ninja zombies or bad writing, but purely of circumstance, bad luck, or evil adversaries. The game hit you hard at the beginning of the third episode when Lily killed Carly. This act of violence was brought on by a need to survive during the whole bit where you help smash her father's brains in. The events of the cannibal farm, along with this random act of violence further proved that no matter what you did, no one in your group was safe in this game. But aside from surviving the zombie apocalypse to keep Clementine safe, it was your job to teach her how to prepare for this world. And I have to admit, this game did a really good job with this narrative perspective. After seeing a doofus like Duck either get other people or himself killed, Lee needed to step up and teach the sweet little 8 year old girl how to defend herself. This was cemented by Chuck, the hobo guy you meet on the train. I honestly keep forgetting that this guy was in the game as he dies almost right at the beginning of episode 4, but the live or die mentality he talks about with Lee on the train is the catalyst for what he teaches Clementine in the means of survival. These lessons and decisions would carry over in all the other games of the series. Clementine will remember that, popping up whenever you made a decision, whether it was making the right choice in a survival situation, or stabbing one of those unarmed cannibal brothers. Those 4 little words would either act as a badge of honor or a mark of shame depending on the actions you took, and that's what made this aspect of the game so enduring. This also brings me to another point of the series that they did very well for the most part. The effects surviving in this hellish landscape has on an individual, pushing them to the limit of what they can take, and more so, how they deal with what they lose. I'm talking about Kenny of course. Now before I start, I want to mention Inuendo Studios and their fantastic video about the character called We Don't Talk About Kenny. This video in particular brings up a great view on the character, his tortured soul, and what he means to Clementine by the end of season 2. Kenny, depending on how you played the first season, was a man who talked big, but rarely was able to act when the situation called for it, or a man who while dealing with the most epic of grief, becomes a man who takes charge and learns to make the tough decisions and puts his own life on the line for others, which is what happened to me. When he made his surprise return in season 2, I was so happy to see this character because, well, the second season is dark. I mean incredibly dark. Which is one of the reasons why it's my favorite season. Of all the seasons in the game series, this one captures the absolute bleakness and brutality of the comics in its most ball breaking form. After seeing Omi die by your mistake, Krista running off into the woods never to return, having to kill a god damn dog, stitching your own wounds while fighting off zombies. Seeing this hillbilly was one of the few endearing moments of the season, because as most of you know, it really, really goes downhill after this. You are kidnapped by Carver, who nearly beats Kenny's head in, while killing other members of your group through acts of brazen cruelty. Carver, by the way, is one of the best villains that Telltale ever devised. This guy is a god damn monster. He is relentless, brutal, and above all, feels completely vindicated with every action he makes. It probably helped that Michael Madsen delivered one of his phone in performances, as I think it was a lack of emotion, or maybe you could call it effort, is what helped make this guy come across as so evil. To do the things he did with such a calm demeanor and tone was what helped really build the evil presence of this character. But hang on, I was talking about Kenny, so why am I talking so much about Carver? Well, it's when you have the choice of whether or not to watch Kenny beat this evil bastard's head in, is what I felt was a crucial moment for Clementine. To look away and try and maintain a false opinion of the world, our look full on into the evil, the butchery, and most importantly, the necessary actions to survive in this world. This moment in particular comes full circle for AJ in Season 4. In this world, there can be a good person in everyone, but when it comes to decisions like these, there is no option to be the better person. There is only kill or be killed. At least that's how my playthrough experience was, and this carries over for Kenny when Sarita dies in the herd. This is when the dude snaps. He is now filled with rage and misery, and tries to mask it later on with trying to survive. But as the group is slowly picked off one by one, Kenny's madness grows. The birth of AJ comes as a slight reprieve, but it is only a falsehood for Kenny's growing insanity. This all comes to a head when it's only you, Kenny, AJ, and Jane left. Jane has seen the hardships of this world, and adjusted to it much faster and more soundly than Kenny did. His madness and her willingness to call out the facts come to a head when she hides AJ to prove a point about how far gone Kenny is. And this is one of the most brutal choices in the game comes up. You either have to let Kenny kill Jane, or you put that poor man out of his misery, which is what I did. While Kenny had grown to become one of my favorite characters, the guy was gone. You can see this if you choose to let him kill Jane, as his reasoning for her hiding AJ is absolutely bogus. I'll admit though, the ending with him leaving you at Wellington and walking into the woods is probably one of the saddest scenes in the entire series. Season 2 was a season that really brought out the best of the Telltale characters, and gave a horrifying yet incredibly compelling view of this horrid world through the eyes of a child who is prepared to do almost anything to survive. Clementine's life is played parallel alongside Sarah, Carlos' daughter. This young girl, who was completely unprepared and incapable of adapting, was a bizarre mirror display of what Clementine could have been had Lee not prepared her for what lay ahead. This character, while one of the most useless of the season, had one of the greatest impacts as her death was inevitable, whether you tried to help her or not. Her death was a cementing point for Clementine for what she needed to do to raise AJ if she wanted him to survive. But then the new frontier came around and kind of screwed it all up. Pretty much the lowest point of the entire series, and that's including the Michonne series, which I've found to be very forgettable and honestly, nothing more than a cash in for Telltale. New Frontier took you away from the Clementine and put you in control of Javier, a character who started off with potential and even had some really funny lines. But as the season progressed, it just turned into one giant mess with some pretty lazy and predictable writing, bad characters, ridiculous setups, and a payoff that left a lot to be desired. So, the show essentially. I could say that the moments with Clementine were okay, but those were poorly written too at times. It was cool to see her a little older and taking care of AJ, but again, sometimes the writing was just dumb. And on that note, while I didn't agree with letting Kenny live, he still deserved a hell of a lot better than what the New Frontier did to him. Kenny, who had defeated insurmountable odds, heartbreaking grief on multiple occasions, literally an unkillable dude, was defeated by not wearing a seatbelt. Are you freaking kidding me? This was such a horribly written moment in the series. At least Jane's suicide made some sense, and she could live with almost anything, but the idea of raising a child of her own in this world was too much to bear. Again, not the best of writing, but certainly a bit more understandable than Kenny forgetting to wear a goddamn seatbelt. There is more, I could say, about season three, but to be honest, it's just best left forgotten, which it seems that's what Telltale did when they made the final season. Because, I mean, this season really stepped up. It had good writing, compelling characters, and hell, it even tried to vary up the gameplay for once. And even despite this season going through Telltale's closure and almost being cancelled entirely, it pulled off the impossible and gave us a satisfying ending. Sure, it played a little bit with some fan service, but it was still pretty darn good. I feel this is because of the writing for AJ. I had never seen a character quite like his before. His rules, his means of survival, and his outlook on the world for a kid who was only six years old made Clementine look like an infant in comparison. Right off the bat, you can see that this little guy was capable of handling himself in some tough situations, whether it be from evading walkers to straight up putting them down. In retrospective, we thought that Clementine had it hard and had adapted accordingly, but this kid is something else. He truly represents the new world, even though he's only roughly ten years younger than Clementine. However, it is this hard upbringing and this style of survival that comes into question when he blows Marlin's brains out despite having disarmed himself. The choice of life or death over other human beings is your main lesson for AJ as you play the game. Everything from the walker couple and the train station to how you interrogate Abel is being watched by AJ. It's a complete callback to the aspects of the first game, even more so now due to AJ's age. All he has ever known is this world. He doesn't know what used to be or what could be again. He only knows this hellish landscape, which is something that the kids of the school cannot accept for the most part. When he kills Marlin and wasn't out of fear or power or hate, it was out of survival. While it was a mistake in some sense, this definitely comes back again during the climax of episode three with Lily. Now I'm going to walk through my decision process of this scene for a short little minute. Lily has been beaten and disarmed after a fight with Clementine. AJ is standing over her with a gun aimed at her head. She is pleading for her life saying that she will never come back, all the while her acts of kidnapping, torture, and the murder of young children are swirling around in your head. Ten is telling AJ to pull the trigger as she will never stop coming after them, while James doesn't want him to do it as it may change his life forever and for the worse. So as you can see, this is a slight callback to what happened with Carver, if that much more extreme, accepting the world for what it was, are hanging on to what used to be. Now, I personally told AJ to pull the trigger. Lily was still a threat, she would not stop hunting these kids, she would not change as a human being due to an act of mercy, so I told AJ to put her down. Now I feel the game was trying to make me feel bad about this decision at first, whether was James berating me for letting him do it, or AJ himself talking about enjoying the act of killing her. But as I said before, this isn't the world anymore, there is no such thing as being the better person, there is survival above all else. And I felt that I was confident in AJ making his own decisions. This kid had survived this long, not just because he was with Clementine, he still had things to learn of course, but I felt he was ready to make his own choices, and that was further proven when he killed Ten to save Violet's life. Ten was a lost cause, his trauma between whatever happened to his face, and the kidnapping and loss of his sisters was too much for him to bear, he had already gotten Mitch killed because of his actions, and he was about to get Violet killed too. So when AJ pulled that trigger, I'll admit I was a little surprised, but at the same time, it was the right decision. Because if you don't tell AJ to kill Lily, and you don't trust him, James gets killed by this evil woman and she escapes, Violet dies due to Ten's decisions, and AJ is no longer prepared to make the necessary choices. And then the barn. Oh man, the barn. I'll admit I started to get a little teary eyed here. After Clem got bit, it was all downhill I thought. The conversation they were having about killing her with an axe of all things was so heartbreaking, but so well delivered. Can you imagine a 6 year old and a 16 year old delivering this on the TV show? It would have probably been horrible. I loved this scene, and while I thought all was over, I thought that this was a great way to end the story. It had gone full circle for Clementine to go as Lee had gone. So after AJ brought down the axe, and it skipped in time to him spearing some fish by himself, I thought, whoa, they actually did it. Oh wait, I need to pause here for a second again. The whole Fort McCarroll thing was, this was the one thing I didn't really like about this season. This ranch had been hinted at in passing between the two characters, but I felt that this sequence was more of a nightmare vision than a memory of all things, at least until you took a terrified AJ out of a locker. This sequence came out of left field so suddenly and without almost any pre-notion that I felt it forced the plot to a halt. I know that this was supposed to cement the idea of Clementine ready to take on the duties of being AJ's protector, but I felt that a new frontier had done this to some extent, at least with my playthrough. Anyways, back to the ending. So AJ finds Clem's hat and that really gives off the idea that she's gone. Then you start coming back to the camp and oh snap, there she is. Even though she looked just as bad as Lee did when he was about to turn, all she needed to do was have her leg cut off to stop the infection. Now at first I felt this was kind of a cop out. I guess time-wise it might have been possible, but Clem looked really bad there at the end. But then you have to realize it was because you trusted AJ to make the tough choices and his decisions saved Clementine's life. I understand that this took the moment out of the player's hands and if you had not chosen to trust AJ's choices then maybe this would not have made as much sense, but I was willing to let it slide because it made sense in this situation for me. And in the end, they finally had a home. The final walk to the room with all the telltale staff names on the walls was a good touch to the end of the series. The company itself had gone through literal hell to finish this series. And while I'm not entirely a fan of Robert Kirkman as a person, the dude has my thanks for helping finish this series. Taking the idea of children learning to survive in the zombie apocalypse was one of the best choices telltale could have made. While the adult storylines were compelling and well written most of the time, it was Clem's character and story that differentiated it from the show and even from the comics in a small way. The tone and atmosphere certainly matched Kirkman's writing, but the character perspective was refreshing and really brought the player into this world and lived with these characters. Telltale games as itself is something that can be talked about for years. Tons of good and bad decisions, great and terrible stories, smart and dumb business choices. The company for sure has left its mark in the gaming industry. And oddly enough, it wasn't even destroyed by an evil publisher, but by their own hubris. Aside from Clementine's seasons, the other season I really loved and wanted a sequel to was The Wolf Among Us. That in itself is a tragedy, but maybe we'll talk about that another day. Anyways guys, thank you for listening to me babble about a game about a girl making her way in the Walking Dead universe. I really did enjoy this series for the most part, and while I am sad to see Telltale go, I'm very grateful that we got an ending worthy of the quality storytelling that started it all. You can find links to all the videos that I talked about in the description below. Some of them are quite old, but really watch that In You Window Studios video. It's a great video about Kenny. Thanks again for watching guys. Hope to see you all soon. Thanks for watching the video. You're probably wondering who I am. My name is Nitz, and you might remember me from the animated cult classic TV show Undergrads. It's been a while, but I'm happy to say the click is finally getting back together in an all new movie, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. But we are still asking for your support. You know Nitz, you can't get more money unless you offer questionable favors. Yeah guy, unless of course those favors involve the ladies guy. By support I mean getting the word out guys. Oh well, couldn't you find a better means than this guy? All he seems to talk about is supernatural or hold a coffee mug real awkward. Why didn't you ask a Kardashian or something? Yeah guy, get in with the ladies guy. Hey he's trying to help out. Like you've been trying with Kimmy Burton? I've seen Jabba the Hutt finish a marathon faster. Yeah guy, you're a massive slug thing guy. To see any and all updates about the upcoming Undergrads movie, be sure to check out and like the Bring Back Undergrads Facebook page. And with any luck, we'll see you guys soon.