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.
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