Desviando da proposta de uma trama investigativa de um policial de Los Angeles em ascensão, L.A. Noire se torna uma experiência chata e enjoativa com o tempo. Apesar dos lindos gráficos com expressões faciais realistas, o jogo nos entrega lores extremamente scriptadas que não dão sensação nenhuma de "missão cumprida", apenas de avanço. Além disso, o jogo possui um mundo aberto totalmente morto, com missões secundárias também repetitivas e que não agregam em nada à jornada do protagonista. Esperava mais.

meus casos favoritos nesse game foram o serial killer com nome Black Dahlia, muito foda todo o enredo e como o assassino se preparava pra matar as vitimas e ainda colocar alguem como bucha de canhão pra ser preso no lugar dele, o arco desse caso e bem fechadinho e bem desenvolvido até, um prato cheio pra quem ama true crime.
Meu segundo caso favorito foi o The White Shoe Slaying, a lore do caso e bem crivel, pra uma mulher isso aqui e um pesadelo diario e nos mostra que homens são muito privilegiados na sociedade, mas o que faz esse ser um caso marcante e o uso da fotografia e ambientação, aquele clima chuvoso, cinza e nublado o tempo inteiro contribui um cenario muito bonito e ao mesmo tempo triste, aquele lugar urbano que não tem espaço pra liberdade ou segurança pública.
jogar la noire pela história vai ter satisfazer bem por vários momentos, mas as mecanicas de direção de veiculos, gunplay e acessibilidade podem te irritar ao extremo ao ponto de vc largar o game, investiram pesado na tecnologia de expressão facial pra no final isso não ajudar ninguem a resolver o caso ou perceber quem está mentindo ou falando a verdade.
o final é meio meh, um pouco esquecivel e jogado na trama

L.A. Noire is a promising experiment from Rockstar's past that in many ways has still not seen its full potential realized.

The core gameplay of L.A. Noire has you take on the role of rising star cop Cole Phelps as you collect evidence, famously use facial cues to interrogate suspects and engage in boilerplate Rockstar shootouts and car chases. in 1940s Los Angeles.

The investigation aspect still largely holds up as novel to this day and scrounging around crime scenes for clues (although the game does hold your hand slightly by alerting you when you've found everything of note) adds an extra layer of accomplishment when you pull it out to catch a suspect in a lie. The game does tend to litter the areas with an often repeated supply of irrelevant items that can be inspected and while things like matchboxes will be crucial evidence in some cases and meaningless in others, the game doesn't do this quite enough to justify the junk.

Interrogations themselves are the main draw of the game as it allows its focus on performance capture to shine as one-off suspects become memorable characters. The actual mechanics of investigations as a whole are kind of a smoke and mirrors trick as no level of failure really has any material effect on the game's trajectory but the performances make even small mistakes notable experiences and the writing allows for a botched question to still provide some semblance of information.

The remastered version also replaces the classic "Truth, Doubt, Lie" with "Good Cop, Bad Cop and Accuse" and while "Bad Cop" in particular is a more fitting description, these still don't quite go far enough to convey how Cole might respond to a suspect. Dialogue choices can occasionally lead on tangents that wind up frustrating, such as identifying that a suspect is lying about something but having Cole call them out on something tangentially related you might not have evidence for.

The open world is where this system starts to fall apart and actually lags behind more linear and abstract detective worlds like the Ace Attorney series where it could have expanded on them. Some later missions do progress differently depending on what order you choose to tackle tasks in but most cases do not involve the kind of backtracking and cross-examining that make both L.A. Noire's predecessors and successors interesting.

Instead, the open world is largely just a stage for car chases, gunfights and tailing missions both in main story missions and side quests that don't really feel distinct or interesting. I often found it grating for a case to end with Cole tackling or gunning down a suspect, when it was infinitely more tense to have to bring multiple suspects into the interrogation room and decide who to charge.

This is especially heartbreaking because the world is so well constructed that in a late-game car chase I crashed my car into a building only to realize "Hey this is the laundromat from mission 3" and the final homicide mission that has you use clues to travel to specific landmarks. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really require you to treat its fictional L.A. as a lived-in and interconnected place, instead just pushing you along from point A to point B.

Much of this is understandable when considering L.A. Noire's true intention is to tell a linear story, which it fundamentally does well. The rise and fall of Cole Phelps is essentially a mishmash of noir tropes but the game does a good job of elevating secondary characters such as Cole's partners and his former military teammates to make the story worthwhile. Cole himself fits pretty neatly into the standard Rockstar protagonist at the time as he is naive enough to act as an audience stand-in but tortured enough to add emotional weight.

My primary gripes with the story are that we don't really get to see much of Cole's life outside of his police work and the war, which takes away some of the gravity of a late-game twist. Also, the homicide desk is one of the most satisfying sections of the game from a gameplay perspective but ultimately reads like a non sequitur as the story ramps up in the second half.

Looking back, L.A. Noire is nestled in an odd space where it was not quite as innovative as it could have been. It does well to bring aspects of the more visual novel-style detective games to the AAA space but fails to fully connect the dots as much of the open world aspects feel like filler.

The 2nd best game after bully with rockstar's name attached and one of a kind in its own little subgenre.

Pros:
A very interesting concept for a game
The acting is well done
The setting is literally the only time anything in video games has been placed in the 40s and not been WWII
I enjoy the general pacing of the cases.
The amount of detail on a lot of the game that most people will just never notice, like all the cars.

Cons:
Feels like rockstar stepped in and forced some gameplay decisions
Everything that isn't the cases feels at best half baked, why would i just randomly enter cars?
The overarching story really gets stretched thin, his wife is more so non existent than an actual character and that's really disappointing.
the open world actively takes away from the game, although i do enjoy the car movement
it is just such a long feeling game when you try to drive everywhere instead of just letting the partner drive you.
A real downer of an ending, the bad guys get away with it all. Its very clear that the noire part is more taking inspiration from chinatown and... that's about it. The 40s noire films always have the bad guy get caught in some way and are usually very hopeful at the end.

I'm picturing an alternate version of this game that doesn't have an open world, has light time management with the cases as you travel to locations on a map screen, and you actually have your family be an aspect in the game. It sounds a lot nicer in my head.

7/10 for the 4/5ths i played of it. The shooting and driving aspects got very tiring. I'll probably pick it back up in a while. I would love to see another try at the concept but that's never happening.

It's a game that has so many damn flaws I feel like I shouldn't enjoy it as much as I do, but damn it if it isn't one of my favorite open world games ever made. The atmosphere and world of a 1947 post war LA are spectacularly done, the actors all do their best with the material given, and I adore the story for about 85% if the run time. The gameplay can be janky, and the front and center interrogations show their age as soon as the first couple, but I absolutely adore this game and would recommend anyone get it on a discount if you can. It is a great time if you can get hooked by it.

bought this back when it came out for the ps3 and got up to homicide before gradually losing grip on it as usually happens when i get really into a game for a hot minute. decided to come back to it last summer though and was immensely rewarded for that. while at times it is still incredibly frustrating due to the early tech being somewhat hard to read, and the updated button prompts during investigation still being somewhat obtuse as to what cole is actually going to say, once you get lost in it there’s very few experiences like it. the game creates such a richly detailed portrayal of the noir film genre, at times really playing like the game version of something like sunset boulevard, double indemnity, or the maltese falcon. as a film girl myself was such a wonder to see the lovingly recreated intolerance set and bombing down hollywood boulevard in these classic cars, hearing the jazzy score that feels ripped straight from the 1940s, it’s a remarkable vibe even if the world itself is maybe a little less developed than one would expect from rockstar.

what really pushes this over the edge and makes it a near masterpiece (other than the very novel detective work gameplay loop) is it’s characters and story. i don’t want to go too in depth as this is obviously a game that rests upon its mystery, but if you’ve seen noir films from the time period you’ll know somewhat what to expect. bad people committing heinous acts only to be stopped by slightly less bad people working for a corrupt system. it’s a game fundamentally about the loss of america’s innocence (if it even had one in the first place) after the second world war, tons of broken men coming back to a country completely different from the one they left, struggling to survive in a world just as harsh as the war zones they just left. it’s also got a ton of other ideas floating around, like the manipulation of the mental health industry, the corruption of institutions meant to protect the people, the systemic racism perpetrated by those institutions, and all framed by cole himself, a character that though being played by the player, has an interior life completely unknown to us, parcelled out piecemeal over the course of the game but for me remaining as mysterious as a cold case