Well this is long overdue but sometimes you have to defend yourself if only to give yourself a semblance of self-respect...
"Also that's complete bull. If you're going to say stories need you to feel good in the end, you're limiting stories so much. Ironic you'd use Macbeth as an example when that story does nothing but make you feel awful in the finale. PS, themes and morals are the base for good story, otherwise you're just tossing things at a wall and seeing what sticks."--LackingSaint
When I said "A good story is something that makes you feel good at the end", I didn't necessarily say that it had to incorporate a happy ending (I actually hate happy endings incredibly, so that was missing the point entirely). I meant to say that a good story makes you feel like your time wasn't spent, specifically in this case, your time wasn't spent on listening to someone's bullshit moral message. Endgame didn't make any sense to me, but in the end the experience was so delightful that I, unquestionably, have to praise it.
Also, when you say "themes and morals are the base for good story", I think of James Joyce, a writer who never bothered with the themes or morals and turned out to be one of the 20th century's finest writers. And J.D Salinger. And probably tons of other writers I've never read. Most good story-tellers generally write about humanity, and bother little with morals and themes. It's the critic's job to translate all of that writing and convert it to something usable. (And Joseph Heller, now that I think about it) So that is that. Also Macbeth made me feel happy at the end. He finally stopped being a pussy and accepted his disaster with great courage. An magnificently well-thought tragic hero.
"If your problem is that the main storyline was the /only/ thing, and that you weren't a "grain of sand in a macrocosm" then I'd have to disagree. It's easy enough to just look around and see that the state of the city has changed, that the splicers have adapted and altered the environment to better survive. There are potential stories in every stray corpse you pass. Clearly the developers cared very much and put in a lot of effort to make it seem like the city was still functioning even as it was dying."--Honeyfish
I was trying to relate your experience to Rapture to that of a journey into a mythic land, but I didn't make it easy did I? Sorry? In the first, by the atmosphere and the characters, you were really nothing. You were like Theseus; small in comparison to the massive, bewildering Gods and monsters. Rapture in the second Bioshock was fleshed out--for good or bad--indeed, but it didn't keep that tone. In about every story, every person dealing with the Devil becomes nothing more than a puppet under his control. That's how the first was like; tossing and turning on a wave, never knowing when the lightning strikes. The second didn't seem to grasp that and it failed in my eyes. In the end, I wanted my moment of electricity, a thunderbolt of surprise and anxiety and diminishment (is that a word?), but it didn't come.
