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Can confirm, I played It
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this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Sounds like a pretty poor analysis video, yeah. I won't go so far as to say FC2 is a masterpiece like some folks, but I do think time and genre-drift have been unkind to it's legacy.
FC2 and MGS4 came out the same year, 2008. Both are obsessed with mercenaries\PMCs because they'd been all over the news for almost 8 years of Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Mercenaries have always existed, but the US was suddenly very interested in exploring the morality of paid contract soldiers. MGS4 explores the high-concept idea of warfare as business, as technological frontier, and as a moral frontier in what paid soldiers are allowed to do versus "real soldiers".
FC2 is also exploring this question, but from a ground-level perspective. Solid Snake is a warrior for peace who ideologically and physically/violently opposes PMCs. Your main character in FC2 (one of many identically statted mercs to choose from) is meant to be part of the problem. I feel like the devs wanted you to experience the descent into violence and the way a person compromise their values for money and power. I also think this is a very hard theme to express with video games.
Thats why MGS4 is remembered well for it's anti-Merc stance, because its very blunt in the text. FC2 stance is more nuanced. They never outright tell you what you are doing is wrong (actually I'm pretty sure they do a few times) but it's notoriously hard to make players feel like a bad guy when they're the main character. You are meant to, as 7bicycles just demonstrated, step back and see that nothing you've done has helped this country. FC2 isnt just anti-merc, it's also anti-adventurism and anti-interventionism.
I think the disempowering aspects--guns jamming all the time, having maleria, fires constantly sweeping around you and causing problems--are meant to be part of that experience. To get you to say, "wow, war sucks, and even being 'the main character' sucks in real war."
It's incredible how well read the guy is and how much effort is put into this video only to whiff every single point because the essayists thought the jackal was supposed to be the good guy and your seasoned mercenary character and all his friends came to africa as good, upstanding citizens.
Other than that I don't even think FC2 is all that subtle. You get to like mission three or four depending on how you count where you're tasked with destroying an irrigation system with the optional side objective of stealing agent orange that your buddy can spray over the fields from an airplane. This is immediatly followed by killing the police chief
Fair point, haha. I don't recall where I read about this, but ive seen the notion brought up in several mediums: it is difficult to break an audiences' tendency to see the protagonist of a story as morally correct, no matter what they do.
It's a problem with all media, but I think film and games are especially dangerous modes for it. Film because of the wide appeal and generally low media literacy. There's a thread up today about people loving Homelander and not understanding that he's the villain.
For games, I think it's even worse because your role in controlling the actions of the main character multiplies the effect. I certainly don't consider myself a racist colonizer but I enjoyed FC2 and I "pulled the trigger"/"clicked the mouse" to kill hundreds of simulated Africans.
I mean, if the main characters of basically any FPS existed in real life, they'd be monstrous war criminals. I'm not claiming either that virtual violence is real or affecting in the way that real violence is, but there must be some psychological effects of inhabiting the eyes and hands of a killer on a mission for so long. It's not an accident that the biggest FPS franchises are military shooters with US military backing.
So... yeah, I think FC2 tried to do some interesting things narratively with making the player the bad guy. You kill for blood diamonds, you play the forces off each other, you "lose yourself" in the mission and go too far to catch the jackal. But ultimately, its much easier to justify the actions of a fictional character in a way that is self-absolving than to sit with discomfort and self-analyze what FC2 is trying to say about you and the larger world you inhabit.