Mafia: Definitive Edition

The following response piece contains spoilers for the plot of Mafia: Definitive Edition. I’d like to tell you it’s not an exciting enough story to worry about spoiling for yourself, but I’d also suggest going into every piece of media as blind as possible. Hypocrisy is beautiful.

 

 

“To me, this is cinema”. Yeah, it’s a meme, but part of the appeal of the meme is that there’s little moments and sequences in art that click with people, that inspire emotions and feelings beyond what you expect of them, that demonstrate clever use of the medium. Ironically enough, video games are ripe for moments that make certain players sit back and appreciate the cinema of a moment. There's more space to play with, opportunities to hit beats specifically tuned to tickle certain imaginations. Mafia: Definitive Edition, a 2020 remake of Illusion Softworks’ 2002 Mafia, is not cinema (I haven't played the original, and I'll be referring exclusively to the remake, calling it Mafia from here on out). It’s a video game that clumsily tells a mostly uninteresting mob story. Its characters aren’t particularly watchable, its plot isn’t a masterclass of crime fiction, it doesn't have anything unique to do in the genre. Every moment lacks punch. The experience lacks gravitas. Strangely, it actually works quite well as a game. For all the shortcomings of its plot, the gameplay largely services it well. The restrained use of an open world is oddly a perfect complement for a mission-based structure. Even if you’re expected to just complete tasks in an orderly fashion, setting them in a fully rendered and available Lost Heaven is a great design choice. Even if you don’t spend much time in it as you roll from mission to mission, the demand to drive from place to place adds an important sense of place to the game. The world itself might lack character, but Little Italy felt like home base long before credits rolled. Contrast this with Mafia III, with its repetitive missions hewing closer to the now traditional open worlds of its era. I stopped playing it because it became such a drag. Where Mafia keeps you rolling from mission to mission, this snappy structure the one legitimate appeal to the game, Mafia III couldn't maintain anywhere near this momentum because of the sheer number of things to do again and again, despite each individual moment being more enjoyable. It's story had more than promise, it's gameplay was more than simply serviceable, but its structure forced me out instead of keeping me in. The first Mafia is much more restrained, cleverer with its world, using it not just for engagement but also enhancing the content that is there. Take, for example, the hunt for a rogue member of Don Salieri’s family. Each time Tommy jumps in the car, first on the trail from informant to informant, and then when shadowing the traitor himself, the radio crackles to life with updates on a baseball game. It's a nice little way to add a sense of time to the mission, a slow burn reminiscent of the opening scene of Drive. Unfortunately, it's not really that special. Little of Mafia is.

 

One moment that did stand out in the narrative was the job that goes bad up north. After an ally is seriously injured and taken to a doctor, Tommy is told by his friends to head home for the night. There’s nothing more to do. As control resumed, I was thinking to myself “they’re gonna make him go to Sarah. Shouldn’t I go and tell the boss that we just got screwed, that we had a shootout with Canadian cops?” I was thinking like a gangster and the developers said Tommy was thinking like a man. The objective popped up: drive to Sarah’s apartment. I love it when you can see where a story is going; I don’t love it when that’s because you thought the writer was about to do something dumb. Sarah lives close to Salieri’s restaurant, so I followed the map until I arrived in Little Italy. With the GPS taking me somewhere else, I couldn’t quite find the gang’s headquarters, so I drove up and down a few streets trying to find it (it is marked specifically on the map, but without a special icon – just some text). If this scene was in a movie, it would be there to show Tommy’s indecision, perhaps brought on by listlessness or trauma. In Mafia, it was there because I was an actor who hadn’t quite done all the background research to inhabit the character. I’d only played as Tommy for a few hours. He’d lived this life for a few years by this point. But I found the right street, saw the gate to the yard was locked, pulled up on the quiet street and got out of the car to peer in the restaurant. Nobody was there, so Tommy and I got back in the car and drove around the corner to Sarah’s like we were supposed to, like I’d been told. Did the attempt to report back add something to the scene? I think so. When Tommy reaches Sarah’s apartment, he’s shell-shocked, silent and stoic not because that’s just how he is sometimes but because a close friend almost died. Eventually, he asks Sarah to marry him and she says “okay”. It’s a good moment, but it works as a moment in a relationship whose development has only been implied, which means it doesn't really work. I can see how this would be a beat in Tommy and Sarah’s story, but it’s only her fourth or so appearance in the game, and her second longest. The first two scenes are so short (and in one her appearance is so inconsequential), if I’d played it two weeks ago, I’d probably be telling you its only Tommy’s second time seeing her in the game. Beyond this, it demonstrates the disinterest Mafia has in depicting consequences from story beats. There’s no fallout of the job going south, of Sam getting wounded, of Tommy failing to report these events to Salieri in a timely fashion. Clearly, that's not what the game was going for. But the lack of consequences and causation makes the story thread feel arbitrary. There’s little cohesive narrative, just big moment after big moment in the life of Tommy Angelo.

 

When responding to a game, there’s a tendency to switch from making critical points to suggesting ways to improve the game. That’s something I think is a little stupid and indulgent. For one, there’s the old Joseph Anderson line about assuming that the developers know every single one of your criticisms and were either unable to implement it or did so and it made the game worse. For another, it’s a little arrogant to say a certain experience would be better than another. You can always do it yourself if you think it’s so good. But I’m going to deliberately break the rule here and suggest that the final gameplay sequence should have been completely different. It’s a level that feels very video gamey, to bring back an older term. The day after Tommy and Paulie carry out a historic armed bank robbery, Tommy has an even bigger shootout with Sam’s goons at the art gallery. I didn’t buy it. I didn’t believe that Sam could have cleared out the gallery like that, that this was one of the moments where a major mob gunfight didn’t see cops rushing into it. I didn’t think it was realistic that Sam had this many people with him, especially when the scene begins with two of his enforcers trapping Tommy with no way out. Sure, it’s fine that Sam plans for the possibility that Tommy makes it to the upper levels and targets him, but it’s a little silly that he has men staggered throughout the galleries, ready to rush out four at a time. He justifies their numbers with a pithy quip about how drug money pays for manpower, but if this extended shootout is meant to underscore the separation of those mobsters that chose to indulge in the drug trade, Sam and Don Salieri, from the more noble underdogs Tommy and Paulie, that theme should have been established properly. As it is, it's just the reason Paulie is able to convince Tommy to do the bank heist. So what would I have done, to have a more appropriately thematic final level? I would have had the two go mano-a-mano: after Tommy takes out his first would-be-killer in the cutscene, there would only have been a few more of Sam’s underlings to dispatch on the lower floor of the gallery. Instead, I’d have made the upper floor a chase, ending similarly to the final moment of gameplay does in the actual game: Tommy and Sam, cat and mouse, a room lined with pillars. As it is, that final burst after rushing through the building, of slamming into cover behind a pillar, peaking around it to deliver a hefty shotgun shot to the chest of a former friend, was a climactic, cinematic moment, but it was undercut by being about five seconds of a much longer, less unique level. Quick aside – I do like how in the following cutscene Tommy tells Sam that if he keeps talking, he’ll probably be able to kill him, Sam seems to think he’s bluffing and starts mentioning Paulie, which spurs Tommy to end his life. It seems like a good way for this to end, from what little I know of Sam.

 

Any given mission in Mafia left me with the same feelings as its final mission. The story is always generic and unimpactful, despite occasional good moments. Any poignant beats are undercut by their reliance on paper-thin setup, on implied histories. Characters have some appeal and there’s some work to depict complex relationships, but ultimately it all rings hollow. There just wasn’t enough time for all of it to breathe and develop, the constant skips in the story undermining any hope at narrative weight. The gameplay is a competent vehicle for this unengaging tale, but not particularly worthwhile in its own right. It's further brought down by worse sections (sneaking through the customs warehouse, for example) and poor ludonarrative moments. And yet its structure can drag the player through, even if there’s no real reason for them to want to keep going. It makes clever use of its open world, which it also includes as a fully explorable area in a separate mode called “Free Ride”. It’s nice to see an open world handled like this: made for the purposes of storytelling. No bloat, just a few collectibles. It’s a shame it wasn’t in service of a more interesting experience. Mafia is not video game cinema, but at least it dabbles in something a little off the beaten path.