Kellogg's memories are a brilliant piece of storytelling...

I just went through the sequence for the nth time, but I haven't really paid attention to it for the last few times because I figured I knew it all already. I decided to really watch it and explore it this time around, and here are some thoughts...

1. The first couple of scenes are a really nice way of tying Fallout 4 to Fallout 2. I never realized you could click on the window in the San Francisco sequence and get a little more background. Kellogg and his wife are both from the Hub, and he went to work for the Shi in San Francisco. The Hub was also where you encounter a guy named Harold...the same one you find in the Oasis in Fallout 3. Kellogg's dad may have run with a raider gang -- which fits in more with gangs like the Khans that had families as we saw in New Vegas. Overall, there are lots of little references to remind you of Fallout 1, 2, 3 and New Vegas together.

2. The start and end scenes are bookends. Young Kellogg sits in bed, with Grognak comics spread out with one open to read. The radio is talking about the NCR, and Kellogg's mother hands him a gun, and effectively gives him his first mission, to learn how to use it. At the end, Shaun is sitting on the floor, also reading magazines with one open, but these are Tesla and medical journals. The radio is again on, this time talking about Piper's article and the mayor's reaction. A courser arrives and gives Kellogg his last mission, to find Virgil. Kellogg encounters you before he can complete it.

3. Kellogg's past is a juxtaposition of a tough guy who is a stone cold killer, yet his entire history is one of running away from dealing with his painful personal life. He ran away from the Hub to get away from his parents, making a comment on how he never even learned what happened to his mother after he left, and that he didn't want to know. After his family is killed, he again keeps running, saying that maybe he wanted to get as far from SF as he could. The scene in the bar just shows how emotionless he is as he keeps moving. He doesn't care that they want him to kill a family. He doesn't care if they want to pay him after he does the work -- and he makes it pretty clear that if they don't pay him, he'll just kill them too and collect what's owed. He doesn't even care if they sit down and offer him the job or not. He moves until he runs out of road in Massachusetts, and then he, so he says, "comes to terms with life," accepts that this is as good as it gets, and signs on to be the chief monster for the Commonwealth's boogeyman. I really love how this sequence never really makes him a sympathetic character, yet it makes it so you can really understand him -- far better even than you understand the main protagonist's motives.

4. Kellogg explains far more of the Institute's motives and actions than is obvious at first viewing. Shaun is one of the old man's "experiments," and he and the kid are left out in Diamond City as bait. The older gen synths aren't tough, but the Institute can produce a lot of them. They aren't very good at working on the surface, and work through agents. The coursers are new, and can pass for human -- which probably contributes to why Kellogg may now be a loose end that needs to be tied up. If you take what Kellogg says and implies, and compare it to what Father says and what the terminals in the Institute say, you can get a pretty damned good picture of what is going on in a game that is sometimes a little too opaque about the main quest arc.

5. The need to move from memory to memory, and the ability to click on different important items to hear monologues from Kellogg gives a sense of engagement and even exploration that would simply not have been there if we had just watched a massive cutscene. It is a nice yet subtle contribution to the sequence.

Overall, it's an excellent sequence in a game that otherwise makes you work for your storytelling. Keythe Farley's delivery of the lines is well done, and the whole thing elevates what could easily have been left as just a somewhat interesting boss fight.