The gameplay holds up and the lighting/shadowing is still impressive, but when it comes to plot wtf kinda bush era shit is this game on?
So Japan straight up violates the post-WWII agreements and remilitarizes. China and DPRK, as a reasonable act of self defense, block Japan off from the yellow sea. Your mission? Help....Japan? wtf?
That's just the intro. The first mission is literally "oh by the way, there's revolutionaries in Peru. Kill them". You go to them to get a hacker they captured because that hacker is the only one who can deal with a certain computer virus. He's the only one who can deal with it because you killed the virus creator in the first game. The game literally has blowback in the first mission lol. You literally grab and interrogate the revolutionaries for information and they even say shit like "you americans think you can just come here and decide our leaders for us" before you snuff them out. Then the next level is killing the revolutionary leader, who is bad because he's a revolutionary. And then hey the computer virus goes out anyway cause you the CIA ultimately suck ass. China and DPRK use the computer virus literally only against Japan, again, an act of self defense. Pretty sure the rest of the game is Sam Fisher running around mismanaging the crisis through the barrel of a gun.
All this stuff just went over my head as a teen but man, its comes across as so bizarre and fash now.
The virgin imperialist lapdog Sam Fisher versus the chad anti-Metal Gear activist Solid Snake
Basically yes, you are filling the role of the American international influence. In that sense you are the bad guy, it is a Tom Clancy game.
The story is actually a little more complicated, and more about preserving the "status quo". China if I recall correctly doesn't play much role in the story but DPRK is massively involved, but not in the way you expect.
spoiler
DPRK does NOT use this computer virus against Japan... Japan uses the virus against Japan. The main villain of the game uses this computer program to make it look like DPRK attacks an American warship and later launches a nuke at Japan. Part of the games story is actually finding out that the North Koreans are in fact innocent and have been scrambling to try to figure out how someone launched a missile through an information warfare attack. The motive actually is a Japanese admiral that wants to throw international relations into chaos in hopes of Japan and America repealing the post-war constitution so the Japanese Empire can rise again. This admiral also coordinates with one of Sam's friends who runs an American PMC. His friend's motive is that he thinks America is dying and this will refresh Americas position in the world. Again this reflects back to the games title. Sam ultimately succeeds in stopping the crisis and preventing what likely would have been WWIII by gathering the evidence and eliminating the ringleaders. The story is less about making the DPRK look bad and more about America preventing another fash country from competing with it.
Didn't the previous game literally revolve around stopping East Timorese genocide victims from striking back at the US for the literal genocide they were subjected to?
I remember the game's conclusion literally has you stabilize a Japanese general who had just committed seppuku out of dishonor. Also everyone Asian speaks in an exaggerated racist accent.
Also you commit various acts of sabotage and murder for the US and then do side-missions to cover up your trail. Like you cover up that one mission in Panama by pretending it's a bank robbery. If I remember right, there's a mission involving the DPRK invading the south. You end in Seoul for something and end up killing a guy, then you can make it look like the North Koreans did it.
Sam Fisher is evil and I hate that because the games made him seem charming and normal in his temperament
Oh man. In the next game of the series, Sam is told of his daughter's death, and so, he agrees to go deep cover to infiltrate a domestic terror group with WMDs. The name of the group?
spoiler
John Brown's Army
If you loved Chaos Theory's politics, you'll love Double Agent's (assuming you can run the game).
I read one of the Splinter Cell books as a teenager and it was absolute imperialist dreck. The gameplay was novel, but the plot is written as if they were trying to live up to and surpass Tom Clancy's hardon for justifying CIA wetworks.
I read the book based on the first game but had to put it down. After the first chapter Sam goes back to his home in the US and starts complaining that black and Mexican people have ruined the neighborhood.
damn. lately I've been thinking about replaying the first 3 games because I loved them as a teenager but don't really remember much of the plot except that the first one has some something to do with Georgia and Azerbaijan and Chaos Theory has something to do with Japan. now I really want to see what all I missed out on as a dumb kid
Fascism is the air western culture breathes: so omnipresent that it only become noticeable in its absence.
There's a reason why Metal Gear Solid 1-3 is king and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is an "in the era" franchise.
You're definitely the baddie, though I think that in Chaos Theory:
spoiler
it is revealed that the real baddie is a private military contractor, who was trying to start wars in Asia in order to drum up business for itself. That doesn't change the fact that by this time you've killed dozens of North Koreans and Japanese people just because they happened to work in the wrong building (meanwhile if you kill an American troop you get a game over).
Those first few missions with the Latin American revolutionaries really hit different for me now than when I was a kid. There's one guy in the first mission who tells you about a raid on his home village when he was a kid when a bunch of Navy SEALs murdered all of the adults, timing their gunfire with the sound of thunder so nobody knew where the shots were coming from, which establishes that the agents of US Empire are absolute monsters (but the game thinks it's extremely cool).
edit: oh and how could I forget the last time I tried to replay it for the nostalgia I quit as soon as I got to the missions in Asia because everybody read everybody has an offensive accent.
I wonder how you could make a piece of media that has offensive American accents. Like maybe set it in Texas but make everyone sound like Yoopers.
Yeah you kill Not-Che in one of the old ones, and I borrowed one of the "newer" ones a couple years ago and it starts with a terrorist group threatening something nasty, pointing out all the US military bases there are around the world and that unless they're withdrawn they'll attack. And then you have to stop them. Bummer.
The most recent Splinter Cell is unfortunately not written nearly as well as the old ones, and might even have worse politics than them. It's basically a "greatest hits" of all of the State Department's enemies since 2001 combined with over the top military fetishization, it reminded me a lot of watching 24.
i was just rewatching air force one the other night and had forgotten that the baddies are communist kazakh nationalists who want to restore the soviet union (?)
they even sing the internationale when their general gets released
also, naturally they've killed gorillions of people (200k)
