Inverting as many things as possible about Disco Elysium would involve a story about an exceptional ubermensch born into greatness with a vast harem of doting fawning waifus obsessing about his greatness where pretty much everything is possible and all threats are just relatively easy obstacles to overcome with more destiny and more greatness, with an undercurrent of "bad people are bad because they resent the great one's greatness."
... Shit, is the opposite of Disco Elysium Sword Art Online? :pathetic:
Halo comes close. It's basically a school shooter simulator which also works extremely hard to justify the Iraq War. (In the 2000s, "religion bad" = islamophobia.) The grunts look and even kind of sound like kindergarteners.
GTA III: San Andreas also comes so close to having good politics. If you could unite your various neighborhoods to provide mutual aid, and if the police were considered just another gang, it would have good politics.
The later part of San Andreas begins by CJ having completed his sellout arc, even pointing out to Sweet how he's now got all this luxurious shit, to which he criticizes him for having completely forgotten about the neighborhood.
Also, you still have CRASH using divide et Impera tactics to profit off of gangs and their drug operations in Los Santos, while poverty and crime remain extremely high.
Unfortunately, things kinda shit the bed with the Los Angeles Riot part of the game, going full "wtf why are they destroying their own communities".
Having the alliance with the Aztecas also extend to say the Vagos etc., having a bigger part of the game be dedicated to the attitude of the police against the Black and Latino communities would have made the game better politically. [disclaimer: I'm not American]
It's not the worst when it comes to politics, but yeah it could have been better.
Slaughtering the Da Nang Boys for the Triads felt wrong to me, even long before I stopped being a liberal. They're not even hostile on sight, they just stand around wearing funny hats.
Also, "Crack is bad" is a big part of the game, and there's a corrupt fed character, why wasn't he the main antagonist? If Rockstar had balls, the final level would involve a truce with all the gangs, they all invade a CIA facility, and then kill Mike Toreno.
I thought Toreno's role in the story wasn't bad - it's very clear he's using CJ and only pulls the strings to free Sweet after a dozen missions of increasingly unreasonable demands. He's even introduced as a member of a drug smuggler syndicate that indirectly helps the Ballas and Big Smoke expand their criminal empire for the sake of geopolitical squabbles and fed infighting.
He's basically the guy that allowed Tenpenny to become a powerful man and let various of the more unscrupulous gangs get rich off of narcotics he probably turned a blind eye to the Nicaraguan Contras selling.
Yeah on replays I'm baffled at how they openly let Mike Toreno explain to CJ that he launders drug money to finance black ops abroad to "stop communism on ohio, people sharing and not buying shit". The delivery is also really funny. Top notch character.
:jesse-wtf:
Like I agree broadly with the Iraq war criticism but... what?
I think they're making a parallel with Jack Thompson calling games "murder simulators" at the time, which is... kinda an outdated reference?
Literally one of the fan favourite mechanics of the series is that the grunts (small alien bad guys) start screaming, crying, and running away in terror when certain conditions are met.
I think that's where they're coming from but idk.
The grunts.