I am certain that, for the most part, the Junk Dealer storyline is by far one of the most unneeded and weirdly-done subplot throughout Chapter 3+.
So, if you forgot what it is, Junk Dealer is one of the important preppers you need to deal with in the 2nd area of the game, after reaching the distribution center. Upon arriving to his location, you'll be met with a rather creepy recording of some girl playing around with a chiral hourglass, before cutting to him, to which he explains he's mourning over her. From how childish she's acting, I assumed she was his daughter who died in one of the terrorist bombing attacks, but nope, this girl is apparently his girlfriend, whom he assumes dead. After sending me through a BT-infested ruin for scrap, he apparently has a need to show off his supposedly-dead fiancé to me again, for some reason?
But apparently, she wasn't dead, as there were no body reports on someone that looks like her (because apparently nuclear bombs don't leave you a smoldering burnt corpse???). So Fragile cross-references people based on her description and voice, and no lie, after 10 minutes later (give or take depending how fast you do the mission) she finds where she is, exactly where she is, currently. And she isn't in some shelter on the other side of the map, no, this girl was literally living just over a hill, a few hundred meters away from this dude, after supposedly being separated from him for a long, long time. You're telling me this guy was so busy mourning and moping about his dead girlfriend to totally random people that he never bothered scaling the shore and checking out the other prepper shelter nearby, for lord knows how long, and happening upon her? A process that took Fragile 10 minutes to sift through and locate her with.
So then the dude entrusts Sam with a comically fragile hourglass, that cannot be placed on your back and must always be held in your hand, to trek through a BT field, allllll the way to his supposed girlfriend whom he doesn't even fully trust to be alive. I make it to the place with my graceful butterfly-esque gentle care of the package, talk with an old lady for five seconds, and then go into a cutscene. With absolutely no initiation or reaction from Sam, the girl just goes into a full-blown monologue for what feels like ages while Norman Reedus (and by extension, me as well) stares at her with a blank face until she stops talking. It's made even worse since the VA is Japanese, and speaks English very very poorly, and instead of making her Japanese too so it can be excused as her being non-native, they made her an American as well. A non-Japanese American voiced by someone who is Japanese and doesn't speak good English, which ends up making her little speech more unbearable.
And in addition, the girl's mother went as far as to lie about the Junk Dealer dying just to keep her daughter safe from looking for him. That same mother entrusted me to haul her daughter through a BT-infested field under constant timefall, to the very person she swore to keep her daughter away from to such an extent, Even though I feel that it should be Fragile doing this as a form of her reconciling for almost killing them both , not Walker Killer Daryl Dixon, a completely random Porter.
So then, after hauling her through a BT field and to her boyfriend, another cutscene plays out. That hourglass I carefully took through a field of evil antimatter ghosts to her, and that she also carries back with her, ends up being thrown onto the ground and smashed instantly right in front of me. And then (for the record, this entire time I was under the impression that she was his daughter, and that the old lady was a mother stealing her child from her father) she asks him to marry her, out of the blue. Then I am relieved, because that's the last mission regarding that. A few days later in the mountains, I check my email randomly, to find they had sent me an email! And you know what it had said? They broke up, he didn't like her, she didn't like him, and they broke up. So what was all that work for then? All that trekking through a dumb B-plot just for them to break up in the end? What a waste.
And for the record, this post isn't entirely serious. I still love the game dearly and the B-plot really doesn't annoy me as much as it sounds like, but it's such a dumb way how it was handled and really only a negative in such an amazing Amazon delivery driver sim such as this.
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