Portal Is Perfect

As you can tell by the title, I truly believe the Portal franchise to be one of the greatest, and most perfect game series' in video game history. Throughout the video we'll be looking at all the ground-breaking elements which make up these two games and how they created such a wonderful and unique experience.

[Iruparazzo]

IIRC, the in-universe reason that the turret bullets seem less deadly is because the cartridges aren't actually fired, it's the entire bullet + shell flung by a spring, somewhat like how a pinball is "fired" in a pinball machine. There was some cave johnson advertisement said something about "that's more bullet per bullet!"

[jasper]

One thing that stands out to me about the final battle of portal 1 is how incinerating the companion cube was a tutorial for a core mechanic during the battle. How naturally this flowed and how long before the battle it was done was made possible by the emotional weight that scene carried, as that lodged it in your brain.

[ultmateragnarok]

I love the detail of GLaDOS's dialogue during the fight. Before the Morality Core is destroyed, her lines are cold, robotic, and impassionate. It's keeping her like that, constraining her to her role. When it's destroyed, she immediately turns to gassing you to deal and encouraging suicide with the rocket turret.
Then, you destroy the next core, the Curiosity Core. GLaDOS directly mentions this at one point: "I let you survive this long because I was curious as to how you made it this far. Well, you've managed to destroy that part of me. As much as I'd like to now, I can't get the neurotoxin into your head any faster." As you destroy these more vocal cores, she loses those aspects of herself. As it's destroyed, she turns to her knowledge, initially joking about not being able to calculate anymore before taunting you supposedly not dealing any real damage to her.
Next goes the Intelligence Core. When it's destroyed, GLaDOS turns to her remaining core, guiding her formidable mental and literal processing power towards anger. She taunts you, being bitter and quick to insult, and throws line after line of discredit, accusations, and so on. "You aren't a scientist. You're not a doctor. You're not even a full-time employee. Where did your life go so wrong?!" In this phase she's also talking faster, with inflections in her voice revealing that emotion's prevalence. Her body writes in its mountings, as she lashes out in every way she can.
Then, the Anger Core is destroyed, and with it GLaDOS falls still, and is reverted to her actual personality. Her lines as she is destroyed show that - "I have an infinite capacity for knowledge, and even I'm not sure what's going on up there. All I know is I'm the only thing standing between 'us' and 'them'. Well, I was. Unless you've got a plan for building some supercomputer parts in a big hurry, this place isn't going to be safe much longer.." and so on, with her going to a relatively stable state compared to before, taunting you and telling you just how much you've screwed up, even as her body fails her.
Excellently designed character.

[ciaranpatrick]

Probably already been mentioned, but at the end of portal 2 the companion cube they give you is the old design from the first game, and with the scorch marks it’s heavily implied that it’s the one you threw in the incinerator in the first game. That level of attention to detail is insane.

[jaydeejay]

On my first playthrough of portal, I thought that the voice was someone on the intercom or a text to speech voice from the staff.
I assumed that the observation rooms were empty because I wasn't supposed to look too closely at them and that they didn't want to animate the staff.
What bothered me the most were some holes in the wall that gave way to the red/brown textures and blinding lights, it made me think about how far from the outside world I must be.
When I discovered some of the secret rooms I assumed they came from previous testers going mad and, when I reached the fire pit, I thought it was just the climax of the facility's immorality.
It wasn't until I walked through the halls connected to the observation rooms that I realized I was completely alone in the facility and that spooked me. It also recontextualized the intercom voice as belonging to someone more nefarious and probably responsible for the facility being empty.
Then when I saw secret hideout rooms in the guts of the facility I realized that what I thought were just test subjects were probably the previous inhabitants of the lab.
And then the voice was a killer A.I. and it all made sense.

[ascnded]

One thing that I loved about the atmosphere and design of portal 2 is just how breath-takingly massive the facility is. In the first game you’re most confined to the relatively small test rooms until the end when you wander through the other parts of the facility (and those areas aren’t particularly massive either). Then right at the start of portal two you have the sequence where your room crumbles apart as it moves and it gradually unveils just how absolutely massive the laboratory is and this us continued throughout the game. I absolutely love it because it creates an almost hopeless feeling as you realize how near impossible it will be to escape such a huge, labyrinth like facilityz

[RedwoodTheElf]

Actually, they had portal surfaces LONG before the Moon Rock gel. The moon rocks only enabled the manufacture of Portal Surface Gell, and was not needed for normal portal surfaces. Even ordinary concrete can form a portal surface.

[jacobN]

You can’t just say the neurotoxin puzzle wasn’t a puzzle because it took you ages to solve. Pretty sure that’s the essence of a puzzle regardless of the amount of combinations to solve it.

[infrabread]

Even as a speedrunner of Portal 2, I still find myself watching videos like this. Being able to mindlessly blast through the maps and resite nearly the entire game from memory is one thing, but understanding why I chose to spend 100's of hours and years of my life in this series is another.
Portal 1 is the perfect game. Does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. Tests, escape, GLaDOS, end. P2 is more. More everything. Story, testing mechanics, and lore.

[sarahkatherine]

59:07 This chapter is not where you escape from Wheatley.

It's the part where he kills you.

[goodluckgorsky]

I actually liked Portal 2 gameplay a lot better than Portal 1. But I now realize that’s only because I’m more of an exploration/navigation gamer than a puzzle gamer in general.

[GavinDennyGlitchyDenny]

During the development of Portal 2 multiple animation test were done of glados in her portal 1 design and broken. This design confirmed how she is an upside down woman that was bound and gagged. This is pushed further with how Caroline was forced to be glados amd wasn't allowed to have free will until she killed off the staff after being booted up.

[boredpancake]

I love how he constantly switches between "this is absolutely not my favourite game" and "this is definately one of my favourite games"

[erdelf]

Disagree with a lot of the second half, Portal 2 feels so much like a natural evolution. Portal 1 is a good game and incredibly tightly designed.. but I disagree that it gave room to experiment. There was only one solution, and the chamber didn't allow for much more experimenting than that. Doing the only thing you can do will always get you closer to the exit.

Portal 2 always made clear how to progress, how to reach the next stage. Gathering all the info about the chamber is how you know the path in both games, even in the chamber you so dislike in the second, it was following the signs to reveal the entire chamber that lead you to the exit.

[beanmann]

My favorite thing in the entire portal franchise is probably the old aperture chapters. The levels are so story-rich, and they did the “Old facility” atmosphere perfectly. The way that you go through the levels so that each time it reveals more story as you uncover more history on the company is very clever. Also, the use of fog in the levels is amazing. The areas look extremely large, until you look behind the scenes and realize the fog just made it look that way.

[Irakli]

The ending with the Moon portal is one of the most perfect moments I’ve experienced in a game. The lore and storytelling build it up perfectly, making it obvious in hindsight but not overdoing it and spoiling the ending. The set piece itself is so cinematic and epic. And there was something about the physical act of pulling the trigger while pointing at the moon that I will never forget.

[isc]

I like how GLaDOS' voice and personality gets warmer and human throughout the two games until she deletes Caroline. potato GLaDOS doesn't even sound like a robot. and the way she rebuilds herself to perfection during the first half of Portal 2 adds personality too.

[MajorSquiggles]

The beauty of portal is the finality of it. How many games are milked to death until you don't even have a memory of what you loved? Portal 1 is short but that's because it does only what it needs to do. It doesn't overstay it's welcome. Portal 2 gave us the last bit of narrative we could want. It tried some new things, told a great story, but they wrapped it all up completely. I can feel satisfied that I had a great experience and can look back on it fondly.

[phillippi]

Something to note about the sound design's relationship with the writing. "Humor and Horror are in bed together" I forget who said that. The two concepts operate exactly the same. They build tension, until it gets released. For example, the classic joke: "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side." Note that the question builds tension. This is held until the listener/reader gets the answer.

The same thing happens in horror. Once, when I was playing Alien: Isolation, something happened which I will now make into a similar joke. "Why did the Xenomorph rip the door off of the locker? Because I was hiding in there."

[Lunarcreeper]

33:57


one interesting thing is that each core is actually removing a personality trait from glados, removing the curiosity core just makes her insult you because she only has intelligence and anger, and once the intelligence core is removed glados just calls you stupid and speaks out of anger until the anger core is destroyed.