The L.A. Noire Video Didn’t Hit

Saturday May 03rd, 2025

Tags: blog, games, youtube

Follow-up to There's A New Action Button Video

I watched the first part of the L.A. Noire video in HD, and I'm glad I did. The production values are tremendous. The opening titles capture that old detective movie feel quite convincingly. The set, costume and props all look fantastic. You can tell a lot of work went into the production.

I knew from the title--Action Button Presents as opposed to Action Button Reviews--that this was going to be a different sort of video, but I wasn't quite sure what. I've watched a little over half of it, and the best way to describe it is the world's most well-produced Let's Play. It seems to be telling the entire story of L.A. Noire through the framing device of Tim, playing a 1950s private detective, investigating the official narrative and trying to untangle the mysteries of Cole Phelps, the protagonist.

I'm not disappointed that he did something different--I really enjoyed the Let's Play portion of his Tokimeki Memorial review, and I don't think a full video with that approach is inherently a bad idea, especially one with such a cool framing device. The beginning of the video is great. He stays in character the entire time, and the way he presents the actions of the player as surreal personality quirks of in-universe Cole is brilliant. I very much enjoyed the descriptions of Cole investigating every irrelevent object he comes across, his generally homicidal driving technique, the way he's dedicated to progressing through the ranks by collecting 18/18 pieces of evidence for each case he works on, at how he gets distracted and runs off to do something unrelated while his witnesses wait patiently for hours to be interviewed: all this stuff is presented with a dry, deadpan delivery that delivered a lot of laughs.

Here's the problem: L.A. Noire is an extremely boring game. Once the jokes about how the player controls Cole have played out, all you're really left with is a collection of one hardboiled detective story trope after another. Tim tries his best to make it entertaining, and there are a lot of great lines sprinkled throughout, but you can't spread frosting on a bale of hay and call it a cake.

I'm nearly five hours into the video and I couldn't name a single non-Cole character in the game except Rusty, and that's mostly because Tim made a point of noting that Rusty is Cole's first partner with a punchy name. Rusty, unlike most characters, has two character traits: he's a drunk, and he always immediately suspects the boyfriend or husband in any incident of violence against a woman.¹ Every other partner, chief of police, crime boss, witness, suspect, every other character in the game is a zero-dimensional plot puppet with no distinguishing characteristics. Which wouldn't be a problem per se, you can make an interesting video just about Cole, but it's not enough to sustain a nine-hour watch.

The Let's Play portion of Tokimeki Memorial is "only" 2.5 hours long, and it's a much more successful example of storytelling through play. Every character has a personality that made me interested in them immediately. Yuina with her mad scientist world domination ambitions, Mio with her silent book-reading dates, Saki with her H.R. Giger fandom, Megumi with her shyness and love of animals,² Rei with his over-the-top rich dick energy, and of course the mysterious Shiori, whose personality and hopes and dreams and fears and insecurities are only revealed over multiple playthroughs and a laser focus on forging a connection.

L.A. Noire is a quintessential example of everything I hated about video games in 2011. It plays it safe and doesn't subvert any of expectations. The face capture technology is the publisher dangling a shiny object in front of the player and hoping they don't notice the comprehensive lack of interesting mechanics, plot, characters or message. In spite of the marketing focus on character personality and interaction, the game exists primarily as a vehicle for intense shooting violence, because that's what you did in a video game in 2011. From what I've seen, it's 100% copaganda with no serious attempt at subversion. Tim, with his cop-disliking private detective character, does his best to hang a lampshade on the tropes and make fun of the game's shortcomings, and it would've made a great 1- or 2-hour video, but the game doesn't deserve the trademark Action Button Deep Dive.

All that said, Tim has commented that this is his favorite thing he's ever made and it's doing fairly well, so I'm not upset that this is how things played out. Maybe if I played the game I'd get more out of the comprehensive roasting, but I didn't and I don't, and that's fine. Not everything has to be for me!

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