Why ‘Bully’ Deserves A Sequel
Bully is the red-headed stepchild of Rockstar franchises. It’s one of the only intellectual properties that hasn’t earned a sequel in any meaningful sense, despite some minor updates to the later re-released Scholarship Edition. I arrived fourteen years late to Bully, but found myself surprisingly enamored with its visibly aged art style and game design. Sometimes stories carry more impact due to their brevity, as opposed to dragging out a concept across three sequential iterations, and perhaps Bully remains a cult classic because of that lack of serialization. But playing Bully in 2020 has caused my imagination to continually envision how the schoolyard concept of Bully could learn the lessons of modern game design and produce a follow-up that is truly special.
The premise of Bully’s story is simple: you play as a teenage rebel, Jimmy Hopkins, who has been repeatedly kicked out of his previous schools and thus finds himself effectively imprisoned in a boarding school known as Bullworth Academy. Most of the gameplay revolves around this high school as a central hub, where Jimmy is introduced to the varying factions and cliques within the school environment like the nerds, the jocks, the preps, and the greasers. In addition to navigating these social groups, Jimmy has to regularly attend classes and perform well during lessons (mini-games). If caught skipping class or sneaking off of school grounds at night, Jimmy will be chased down by guards or policemen and “busted” – returning to where he is intended to be.
The gameplay of Bully will feel very familiar to anyone who has spent time with other Rockstar games before. You have a mini-map with multiple missions to be tackled in any order, running between waypoints and completing various tasks to deepen your allegiance to a specific group or person. You do shady things for money, you can start a fight with just about anybody, and you could effectively ignore the story for the sake of the world’s sandbox. Unlike other Rockstar games, however, there are no guns with which to shoot people. You cannot hijack cars from random drivers and get away with it like in the Grand Theft Auto series. Some of these deviations will be off-putting to someone expecting all of those gameplay elements to be integrated here, but I personally found their absence to be refreshingly true to Bully’s characters and setting.
Bullworth Academy: An Excellent Environment
Bullworth Academy is the true show-stopper in Bully, from its pun-dripping name to its physical layout. The architecture appears looming and timeless, almost carceral with its imposing walls and brick facades. Running from place to place within this environment took just the right amount of time to feel like you were exploring and familiarizing yourself with a dense – rather than an open – space. Slowly, the game opens up other sections of the city surrounding the academy, but they never capture the intimacy that is to be found behind the school’s walls. Even though the game starts to lean more heavily on that external world for much of its later mission structure, Jimmy’s character always felt out of place in this environment, like he wasn’t supposed to be there (he wasn’t, usually). There is a sense of relief in making it back to his dorm room just in time to pass out before the 2AM deadline, knowing you had milked out every last minute of that day completing useful tasks. The dorm room feels like a safe place, as close to “home” as this game ever allows.
Bully’s greatest strength is its density. Though Bullworth Academy stands as one of the more impressive design decisions made throughout the game, I can’t help but feel like a large part of my appreciation for that space is due to the methods of traversal available to the player within the game. As aforementioned, you can’t just snag the nearest car off the side of the street to move around this world. Jimmy can run, whip out his ever-present skateboard, or locate the nearest bike garage on the map to pedal around. Running is the slowest way to move around. Skateboarding is about twice as fast. Biking is even faster. But they all feel like awful ways to navigate the outside city. One of the biggest design flaws that affected me personally was the need to repeatedly tap the A button to run, skate, or bike around at their higher speeds. This meant that any time outside of a cutscene or mini-game was spent incessantly tapping the A button, causing my hand to cramp up and tire out pretty quickly. I remember this being an issue in earlier Grand Theft Auto games as well, but those games eliminated that fatigue due to the ease at which vehicles are accessed. If Bully were to get a sequel, as I think it deserves to, this aspect of traversal would be the first thing I would change to improve the overall experience to a modern player.
Fans of Bully might object to my criticism about traversal in the game by rightly pointing out that there are copious bus stations littered around the outside city, all of which instantly drop you right back off at the gates to the academy – for free and regardless of the time of day. To be clear, I am not saying that adding in vehicles to Bully is the solution, nor am I claiming that the bus stations weren’t useful enough – although it might be useful to take the bus out into the city as well. To me, the presence of bus stops in the game belie the fact that the campus of Bullworth Academy is just inherently more interesting than the surrounding city. So little of the city is revisited apart from the singular mission that takes you there. I think of the distant carnival at the edge of the city, where you can go on a date once, for example. Yes, you can return to play around with the various mini-games present – all of which are cheeky, many of which are genuinely fun – at your leisure, but the game never steers you back there. Thus, much of the city feels unintentionally vacant, whereas the school never did. If a future Bully game were to similarly expand beyond campus into the outside world, then traversal and mission structure would need to be more tightly integrated in order to incentivize the player to spend more time beyond the school’s walls.
How Has ‘Bully’ Aged?
The writing in Bully feels entirely like a Rockstar game with its overly exaggerated parodies, its gross stereotypes, its horrible characters with horrible motivations, all strung together with biting satire of American culture – and in this case, high school in particular. All of the characters have disproportionate features to better reflect their inner character. Some of the jocks are voiced to sound like absolute knuckle-dragging cavemen. The design of the nerds is all over the place, with one character whose zipper is always exposing his tighty whities underneath, another fully equipped with pocket protectors, another with cold sores and braces. One of the nerds even campaigns for school office with unfortunate Nazi symbolism, visually conveying the brutally twisted superiority complex that can develop within this subgroup. It’s a game that wants to have a slapstick joke one moment by throwing the annoying kid in the trash can, and at the next moment delve into more serious undertones like power structures and the dangers of coercing young people. Though I found these tone shifts jarring, I think the potential is here for both to exist in a better-written sequel.
One of my primary motivators for exploring this idea for a follow-up Bully game – sequel, spinoff, or otherwise – is that the game has aged poorly with its appearance. Its visual aesthetic is washed out, boxy, and ugly. The environments belie their textures, and the native resolution – even of the rereleased Scholarship Edition – is disappointingly poor. Whereas games like Psychonauts from the same era have aged rather well due to their abstractness and cartoonish design, Bully leans on realism for its setting but not for its character models, and thus there is an awkward blend of clashing design. In Bully, I can’t point to a single thing and say that it visually impresses me – and that’s a high point of concern, as art design is one of the things I care about most in a game. Luckily, Bully’s ugliness is excusable because of its unique premise and silly storytelling. If there were to be a new Bully game made with modern graphics and design, I think the premise of Bully would bring a whole new generation of gamers into this sort of twisted satirical universe that Rockstar has designed.
Luckily, when playing Bully for the first time this year, I fell in love with certain aspects of it. The soundtrack to the game is surprisingly catchy and diverse, despite restraining itself in style and instrumentation largely throughout even the game’s more bombastic moments. I find myself listening to the overworld theme in particular, probably due to the hours spent strolling around tapping the A button along to the thumping of the bass. I also continually think of some of the sillier missions in the game, like when you have to dress up in the Bullworth mascot costume, or prank people on Halloween, or completely mow down people with snowballs from a rooftop. The game cleverly evokes an almost Hogwarts-esque campus redesign for each major holiday and season, which creates a timeless nostalgia – for better or for worse – that many people’s memories of high school will easily recall. And the overall mischievous nature of the game, its characters, and the meandering but ultimately bizarre storyline all add up to something that, despite its flaws, I can’t help but feel a genuine fondness for.
Lessons to Be Learned For A Sequel
I think one of the major lessons that could be learned with another Bully game is to more tightly integrate the varying mechanics and interactions you have within the school. For example, many of the missions found on school grounds will involve Jimmy raising trust with one faction at the expense of another. Unfortunately, you don’t develop any specific relationships with the characters that make up these factions. Nor do your successful lessons in class seem to greatly benefit you in a lasting way throughout the gameplay. If Bully could learn the lesson of the Persona formula that integrates daily school life and relationships in a way that makes combat and other aspects of gameplay more streamlined and improved, then I think there is an almost unlimited possibility to better flesh out the relationships between individual members of these groups. I would be very interested to see the idea of gameplay bonuses or perks for siding with specific groups or members, leading to genuine choice and sacrifice when picking between them.
Many people have lamented the idea of a “Bully 2” follow-up project, despite there being a consistently strong word of mouth for the original game over a decade later. One of the most common concerns I’ve seen expressed is the idea that this specific setting with these specific characters wouldn’t work in a follow-up. Part of what drives the plot of Bully is the town coming to terms with Jimmy’s moral character, and it’s difficult to imagine meaningful character development happening with the same pieces fixed in place. No doubt, this is part of what drove Rockstar to start and stop development on a sequel to Bully numerous times over the years.
To me, it’s easy to imagine a game with the exact same premise but in a different setting or with different characters involved. To enjoy a sequel, I don’t need to follow the story of Jimmy Hopkins any further, nor are any of the core cast memorable enough to deserve a spin-off game on their own. I think there is potential for a new protagonist to arrive at Bullworth Academy and for the plot to go in entirely different directions, and yet I also think we could follow Jimmy Hopkins to college and have the world fleshed out in that way. In either direction, I think there is immense possibility for the story and setting to be explored more deeply but with the benefit of modern game design. I hope the idea of a follow-up to Bully won’t end up in the bin like the many nerds I dunked throughout my playthrough.
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