Title. Need some examples of games that had lefty politics and leanings and weren't too ashamed to hide it. Platform/country of origin is irrelevant. I know about FF7's support for ecoterrorism, and even the nuance about the people caught up in the middle, and there's plenty of games that take an anti-corporate stance, but that can be easily brushed aside.
I'm specifically interested in this era as it's when games first acquired the ability to become fully immersive in their narratives with the adoption of multimedia melding into the core gameplay loop via the use of full motion video, voice acting, detailed images and so on.
Reminder: all games are political; even abstract puzzle games.
Warning effort post.
I'm convinced there are some anti-capitalist themes in the early resident evil titles.
spoiler for a twenty-five year old game
So, the first game is about weird billionaire eugenicists using their bioweapon company to create a perfect human based on their warped sense of purity. Only for it to destroy them.
Most of the enemies you fight are weapons developed as part of the military industrial complex.
Racoon city and its surrounding wilderness is crawling the products of failed Umbrella experiments but nothing is done about it because Umbrella has its hooks in anyone with any power. The powers that be in racoon ignoring the biohazards so that they can make themselves richer would be seen as hamfisted if it was written today.
RCPD ultimately protects property over people, so the only time they're actually called to deal with a BOW outbreak is when a corporate owned estate is in danger. And some notes in the orphanage reveal that the RCPD are actively supplying Umbrella with test subjects through kidnapping "undesirables" such as orphans and the homeless.
The US government is concerned entirely with retrieving the weaponry it payed for and covering its own tracks. It makes no attempt to rescue anyone and just nukes Racoon when it gets what it wanted.
Tl:dr "let's say for the sake of argument, if zombies were eating your neighbors, couldn't you just sell your house and move?" :shapiro-gavel:
This a great writeup and interpretation, I had never drawn the connection between STARS being called in only once the bioweapons threatened the manor property.
The later games are pretty much a (very convoluted) continuation on the same themes. The villain in RE4 wants to use the plagas for financial profit and political influence, Wesker starts a company to funnel money into perfecting his doomsday eugenics. RE6 is definitely a turd but iirc bioweapons have gone from potentially apocalyptic to commonplace tools of capital. Corporate espionage leads to outbreaks a few times throughout the series.
That said, there is a lot of really dumb shit in the middle games and re 7 and 8 really shy away from anti-capitalist themes by comparison.
Ok, thanks for providing further context. The only resident evil games I've completed post-nemesis are 6 and revelations 2 so I wasn't sure if the series kept up its themes.
:agony-acid:
I'm so sorry for your loss
I actually kinda liked it as a dumb schlocky action game.
You could tell it had tons of money and time put into it- it's not like it was some cheap piece of shit the studio crapped out. It was just clear that Capcom had no confidence in the franchise's identity with both RE 5 and 6 being attempts to desperately marry the RE4 formula with then-current gaming trends.
7 and RE2:Remake were a spectacular return to form (though the Revelations games were decent too)
6 definitely had an identity crisis. Imho revelations 2 had a more clear vision of what it wanted to be, but the episodic structure wasn't handled particularly well and hindered the plot structure and pacing.
Is 6 the one where he punches the boulder? That owns.
I think that's 5.
You are 100% correct in this analysis, and I'm glad you noticed the deeper undertones in the story beyond "bad corporation"; the entirety of Raccoon City's bourgeoisie is in Umbrella's employ and exists to further their interests, whether they are aware of it or not.
Thanks, I considered not posting this because it felt like a stretch.
Not a stretch at all. Raccoon City is a company town through and through
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I wanted to hedge my bets because I haven't played many of the later titles.
are you sure you don't want to express this in a 7.5 hour video essay?
Seconding Resident Evil, you put a lot more effort into the post than I would have though so props for that lmao