Capping off a 21-year legacy, Red vs Blue: Restoration marks the end of its creator Rooster Teeth. Coinciding with the company’s shutdown by Warner Bros, this final entry in the long-running web series is a mixed bag, but a bittersweet swansong for one of the founding fathers of internet content.
Written by original creator Burnie Burns, Red vs Blue: Restoration retcons everything after The Chorus Trilogy as simulations run by the AI fragment Epsilon. Instead, we pick up sometime after with Blue Team’s Lavernius Tucker taken over by the Meta armor he wore during that trilogy’s final battle.
Restoration’s opening twenty minutes are rather confusing. It’s not clear how long after the events of Chorus the story starts or how long Tucker has been taken over. However, as the story starts to find its footing with Red Team’s Sarge, Grif and Simmons teaming up with the affable Caboose to save Tucker, it transforms into a bittersweet goodbye to the greatest web series ever… of all time.
Once the narrative hits its stride, RvB: Restoration becomes a greatest hits of the series’ 21-year history. There are obvious issues: Caboose’s new voice actor doesn’t hit the same as his original, and the shortened runtime does mean characters such as Agent Washington, Lopez and Sheila don’t have much time to play. That shortened runtime also results in less jokes and more action, although there are some standout comedic scenes — such as a work-from-home security team — that manage to crack a laugh.
Created half in Halo Infinite using machinima and half with CGI animation, Restoration feels far more natural than its controversial spin-off Red vs Blue: Zero. There's a bit too much CG, namely in the opening, and some machinima work looks shoddy, but overall it is a return-to-form for the web show.
Really, Red vs Blue: Restoration is a goodbye and a thank you to fans of the series, and now to Rooster Teeth. Among its many callbacks, fight scenes and jokes, there’s a sense of melancholy that it’s over. It’s a fitting end: the series goes out with a bang and (once again) brings back deceased characters for one last ride, and the sense of finality hits even harder as a result of its creator’s closure.
As the final season reaches its end, it’s hard not to feel the heartstrings pull for fans of the show. For someone who’s seen every season, PSA, behind-the-scenes and even VR video, as someone who’s painted RvB miniatures and uses a Caboose avatar in VRChat, the final credits to Trocadero’s Vale Death is as emotional a goodbye as I could’ve asked for.
The final season doesn’t hit the highs of the juggernaut Red vs Blue: Season 10 and the finale speech of The Chorus Trilogy continues to go unmatched. In fact, I think even The Shisno Paradox may have been slightly better balanced overall. However, as a bookend to a period of the internet we’ll never see again, and a farewell to two decades of these characters, Red vs Blue: Restoration is beautiful when it counts.
If you’ve never seen RvB before, Restoration is definitely not for you. However, if you’ve been a fan of Rooster Teeth’s web series at any point since its April 2003 debut, this is as sincere a tribute as we could ever expect.
