May I ask what was the big deal with Sarah in the remake?
They turned her from a normal female character with a normal personality given the time period into a 21st century ideal of a stunning and brave queen. Gave her the Mario movie Peach treatment. There isn't even any relevant explanation in the story for why she became a boss bitch, she just is because fuck you, wamyn were always stronk.
I do appreciate that she is given more screentime at least, she's a very important character and even in the old game she was a strong influence on Tom's behavior and motivations. Precisely for that reason she didn't need to become this stronkwoman caricature in the first place. We just didn't see into their relationship very much which was a shame.
Now, she isn't the only character that was made worse in the remake. New Paulie is a psycho cunt, which isn't entirely out of character for him given his troubled nature, but his charming friendly side, which was very prominent in the old game, is hardly to be seen in the remake. He's just a callous prick most of the time. In the old game, 95% of the time you'd be interacting with a 'good' Paulie, and you'd mostly be hearing about the 'bad' Paulie from bits of Tom's narration or dialogue with other characters. Only in a very select few scenes would you see Paulie acting cruel, which is supposed to create this conflict of perception about his character. I always thought that was an example of really good writing. He's a character whom you really want to like, but as the story progresses it gives you more and more reasons not to.
In fact I could give this criticism to many characters in the remake. The old game relied a lot more on dialogue to convey details about the characters' personalities and behavior, which left you to draw your own conclusions on a lot of things. That's exactly how things work in real life too, you can't just switch to another person's POV to see everything they're doing and thinking. As a result the entire cast, or at least the more prominent story characters, felt very human and with depth. The remake doesn't really give a fuck, it just shows you everything and leaves few questions unanswered. Which becomes a larger problem because it isn't very consistent.
Yeah I love this game if you couldn't tell. <3 Now I wanna replay it.
Bonus: a video of the director of the original game commenting on the remake's ending, with subtitles (
contains spoilers obviously, for Mafia 1 and 2)