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.
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.