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It's not the greatest writing in the world, but it is a different kind of writing and pretty funny. Yes, I'm rolling my eyes when any kind of centrist/liberal content gets criticised, and as for being a conservative well that's just straight up Fascism, but I really like Kim Kitsuragi, the one sane person in Martinaise and noted speed-freak, as well as the adventures of Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau.
I think the burns on Moralism make the most sense when one understands two things: firstly, Moralism is basically EU: The Ideology, and secondly, Harry specifically choosing to be a moralism is basically him going "Yup, I live in a colonized hellhole that's being exploited by foreign powers and serve as their enforcer, and I'm completely OK with it, because hey, what's the alternative?"
Within the context of Revachol's particular situation, at least the other ideologies are trying to do something to the situation (even the ultralibs if Joyce can be trusted), while the Moralists are just sunk into self-serving complacency that allows this shit to go on indefinitely.
The game is fair-minded that the Communist revolution was shit for the people, and the Communists once they lost started on piling up the mountains of skulls as well. Moralism has a good ideology, but as it's practiced it's inane at best and actively repressive at worst. But so is Communism! Mazovian ideology was also good, but putting it into practice meant the mountains of skulls and the People's Nuclear Pile that irradiated everyone to death.
The digs at the EU are really spot-on for a European, but it's also that Luxembourg/Monaco/Switzerland rich person's playground and tax haven life that is criticised. For countries such as Ireland, the EU was a godsend in, basically, hosing money into the country for development that our own government could never do. That's how it should be for Revachol, but because of the Revolution, they're making an example of it. Though even there, parts of it are already comfortably on the middle-class, fuck the poor lifestyle, it seems to be Martinaise that is being deliberately neglected as an object lesson.
What I take away from the game is that you honestly don't know who to trust or believe; the bad guys have good points and the bad guys pretending to be the good guys are both doing good and doing bad, while the good guys who ostentatiously set themselves up as the good guys aren't that good. You can trust Kim because, ironically, he's been an outsider due to his Seolite ancestry all his life, hence he's not plugged in to any of the networks of influence or power, but he does his job. You can trust Harry because all he has left is his job, which he is scarily good at, and he's gone so batshit insane that he too is outside the webs of connections.
All that may be left is a miracle, and even miracles are not unalloyed wonders. There is a different reality outside what they all think they know, and it may be destroying them right this second while they squabble over history and economic systems.
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I do recall liking Kim the best during my 8-10 hours in the game, just for being the reliable straight man most of the time, though I also found him a bit on the dull side. Some of the other characters had really fun and outlandish personalities, but what got me for those was how much the writing just took me out of the game. It constantly made me picture some writer sitting at his desk typing out all this clever dialogue out in between break sessions to sniff his own farts. To some extent, I'm consciously aware that all video game writing is created this way, but when I think of writing in works like this being "good," part of it is that it momentarily, and perhaps only on an emotional level, makes me forget that the people I see on screen are merely marionettes being puppeteered by an author for the purpose of manipulating my emotions and instead makes me believe that this is a real person with a real history in some real world expressing himself. I want the writing to manipulate my emotions, not to remind me that it's trying to manipulate my emotions.
(Aside: this is a major part of the criticism - tangentially "woke"-related* - of the drop in quality of writing in the MCU, where everyone is a clever quip-machine all the time. When a handful of high profile characters like Tony Star talk this way, it was funny and somewhat plausible, but when almost every major character talks like this, the suspension of disbelief is harder to maintain, on top of just being tiresome).
To be fair, I think the voice acting, particularly the (likely intentionally?) overdramatic ones for the various emotions or characteristics of yours who would speak to you, didn't help. And the game started right off the bat with such internal monologue and never clawed its way back in my
eyesears. So I may be unfairly docking it points for that instead of just the writing.* Obviously there's nothing about the "woke" ideology that insists on stilted writing in and of itself. But it's still tangentially related, because the "woke" influence being discussed is modern political messaging being inserted into the writing for the purpose of influencing the audience's behaviors, and due to the totalizing nature of the "woke" mindset, the authors have trouble doing this with a soft-enough touch to feel natural within the fictional world. Which then reminds the player that they're being lectured to by a script writer, rather than being immersed in a fictional world.
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