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 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.