Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales Spoiler Thoughts

I really love the liberties taken with The Tinkerer. Changing the character from an old white guy to a black woman that has a personal history with Miles was a fantastic idea that makes her a much stronger antagonist… for the most part. To expand upon/elaborate on what I mean by the story sharing parallels with the original game’s: both games feature a villain whose identity is someone close to Spider-Man (Martin Li/Otto Octavius, Phin), that has a vendetta against another bad person in a position of power (Norman Osborn, Simon Krieger), who is so hellbent on revenge that they’re willing to put the safety of innocent people at risk using the creation of their vendetta (Devil’s Breath, NuForm). The only real difference here is that Phin learns she’s wrong in the end and sacrifices herself to save innocents rather than doubling down and losing herself to madness. This isn’t a bad thing in a vacuum, but it’s the fact that the story beats feel so similar to the story of the original game that keeps this story from having the same impact as the original for me.

I suspected that the game would include Aaron Davis, aka The Prowler, in the game. He’s a character that’s too important to Miles’ history to leave out. As opposed to making him a villain that manipulates Miles like in the comics, or keeping his identity a secret from Miles like in Into the Spider-Verse, Insomniac’s approach is to make Prowler a (mostly) upstanding person who’s trying his best to change his course in life, but fear for his nephew’s safety leads him to sell out Phin to Krieger, as well as clash with his nephew in an attempt to physically keep him from getting involved with the Underground vs Roxxon conflict any further. While for the most part, I think his actions made sense, I think that ambushing Miles in the lead up to his boss fight felt extremely out of character. The story leading up to the boss fight in general feels extremely forced for the sake of having the boss fight in the game in the first place. I think this version of Aaron would’ve more likely sat his nephew down for a serious talk as opposed to just straight up attacking him the way he did. I’m glad he came through in the end with the confession that leads to Krieger’s arrest, but this happens off-screen, which is very disappointing.