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rallamajoop · 5 months ago

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I have too many feelings about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (3/3)

The story so far: we've covered gameplay and worldbuilding, we've covered story. Now I get to talk characters. And while I'm at it, go off on a tangent or two about some of my favourite touches from Human Revolution, and why I'm still in the habit of calling the hero of these games by his last name.

Characters

Much as I do love Jensen, it’s no secret that Francis Pritchard is my favourite character in this series. His snarky banter with Jensen during missions is so much of what made Human Revolution for me. When I later tried out the original 2001 Deus Ex, I even joked to a friend, “There’s this guy in my earpiece who keeps giving me straightforward, good advice. It just seems so unprofessional!”

Faridah Malik, Jensen’s pilot, is his other major human contact in HR – a friendly face to get him to and from different settings, and occasional voice in his earpiece as well. But it’s not just Malik and Pritchard you’ll be hearing from – you’ve got Jensen’s boss, Sarif, mocking him for his surprise that the SWAT penthouse villain has a panic room, plus so many other random contacts calling Jensen up and prompting ‘how did you get this number?’ complaints that I started to wonder if it was tattooed to the back of his neck.

I knew going into MD that Pritchard wasn’t returning (except in DLC). Halfway through the first mission, it began to dawn on me that Jensen’s new, aggressively-British, aug-hating coworker, Duncan MacCready, seemed to be being set up as the new Pritchard – ie, the asshole in his earpiece with whom he’ll gradually develop a grudging semi-friendship over the course of the game. This did not immediately enthuse me. Pritchard’s initial dislike of our hero may have been petty, but at least it was personal, seeing Jensen as an under-qualified nepotism hire. MacCready just hates anyone augmented, which would be pretty weaksauce even if Jensen had, y'know, ever actually chosen to being augmented to begin with.

It's not like it would be hard to come up with better reasons why someone might distrust Jensen: he's secretly working for a hacktavist network, was declared legally dead in circumstances he can't explain, and MacCready would be right to find him suspicious. But I knew MacCready was a popular character, so I resolved to give him a chance.

The reality proved much worse: love him or hate him, MacCready is hardly in the game at all. You can go talk to him in the office a bunch of times about why he hates cyborgs so much, but he’s only deployed with Jensen in the very first mission and the very last one. Jensen seems to have relationships with a number of his other new colleagues, but for most of the game, there’s no radio chatter at all. Infolink calls happen occasionally, but are vanishingly rare. Even when doing missions for the Collective – a group dominated by augmented hackers – Jensen’s left to fly relatively solo.

Jensen’s main contact at the Collective is Alex Vega, arguably the new Malik, at least in that she’s an augmented woman of colour and nominally a pilot (though she doesn’t actually do any flying for us) on friendly terms with Jensen. In fact, DXMD has given Vega a substantial redesign to make her less of the shallow Malik-clone she was in her "original" appearance, in the lesser known mobile game Deus Ex: The Fall. You can see her and Malik in the comparison below.

Yeah, there's really not a lot to set them apart. She's a pilot? Give her short brown hair like our last pilot, stick her in a flight suit, and call it a day.

As of MD, the new!Vega is black, does her hair completely differently, has more obvious augmentations, and doesn't live in a flight suit: okay, fine, no harm in giving the character some individuality (though why you'd insist on giving her the same name as the old Vega at that point I do not know).

But looks aside, it's on the characterisation front they've really let her down. There was never a lot to Malik beyond being straightforward, friendly and professional. But you do get an optional side-mission to help her solve a friend’s murder, and the big set-piece where she’ll die if you leave her and run like she tells you to (also the reason I’ll probably never get a certain achievement, but fuck it, I like Malik, I don’t need that achievement that much). Straightforward as Malik is, what makes her work for me is that it’s so easy to buy her as someone with her own life outside Jensen’s crazy world. It’s to the point where I almost don’t want to see her get dragged any deeper into the whole conspiracy plotline, because she’s so easy-going and normal she shouldn’t have to be. Basic as that is, when you’re having a reaction that strong to a character, they’ve done something right.

Vega, by comparison, clearly should be a much more memorable character – a pilot working full-time undercover for a top-secret hacktivist collective? But Vega too seems nice, and normal, and yet has no role in this story except to be Jensen’s contact. You can ask her a bit about her backstory, but it made so little impression I can’t remember it. She’s nominally so much more important than Malik, but she never gets to do anything as interesting as making up a nickname for him, hijacking a bunch of public TVs to get back at her friend’s killer, or make the tough decision to tell Jensen to leave her and run. She’s just there to deliver plot-relevant information.

Other characters fandom had led me to expect much more of were similar non-events. Koller, Jensen’s go-to guy for aug maintenance, is certainly a character, but not one that grabbed me, and he appears all of twice, neither time for very long. There's got to be a hell of a story as to why Jensen, an Interpol agent with connections to a whole network of augmented hackers, is going to a weirdo like Koller for aug maintenance, but the game doesn't seem to think that's a story worth sharing, so there goes another wasted avenue to do something interesting. Chikane, Jensen's actual pilot, has far more meat on his bones character-wise and more interaction with our hero. But he’s probably a traitor (I say ‘probably’ because the strongest hints are a coded message in a well-hidden safe, and finding it changes nothing), so there's not much point investing in what camaraderie they develop. Similar is Delara, an obvious Illuminati-plant who spends the game acting innocent and helpful enough to make you wonder if maybe she’s alright after all, only for an after-credits scene to reveal that, yup, she’s an Illuminati plant. Is this supposed to be a twist?

The one major character I did get decent value out of is Jim Miller, Jensen’s Interpol boss. Seeing a convincingly Aussie character in a position of authority in non-Aussie-made media is novel enough that I’m always going to get a kick out of it (even if his backstory does involve that whole ‘Australian civil war’ thing, which is hilarious in so many ways that I’m not sure non-Australians appreciate). Doesn’t hurt that Miller’s subtly queer too – hacking his computer will turn up info about his (ex-)husband and kids.

And that’s about it. There’s a local Prague underworld, but no-one involved is as enjoyable as either of the Tongs in HR, and agreeing to put yourself in their debt on Koller’s account means you’ll get to do a couple of extra side-quests, none of which will give your conscience much trouble. Is this really the best they can do?

When it came out, Deus Ex: Human Revolution was rightly criticised for a weak ending and some seriously ham-fisted attempts at worldbuilding and social commentary. I knew all that going in, and was still astounded by how bad it was at introducing its own ideas. But for all its flaws, I fell in love with its characters, and there were some touches that really stuck with me. I've had a whole mini-essay rolling around my brain for months just on the subtext it packs into who's on a first or last name basis with who – Jensen especially.

Our hero is ‘Jensen’ to most of his workmates (past and present), but ‘Adam’ to Megan and Sarif – Megan because they used to date, and Sarif because he’s the kind of friendly, personable boss who calls all his employees by their first names. But that familiarity takes on a whole other sinister dimension when you realise that Megan and Sarif are the same people responsible for basing their research on Jensen's DNA without his knowledge or consent (and in Sarif’s case, cutting off three perfectly good limbs while he was in a medical coma). Eliza – an AI who’s been watching him for god knows how long – calls him ‘Adam’ too. (So does Wayne Haas, the cop you have to talk your way past to get into the station, which is just more proof he’s Jensen’s bitter ex.)

Meanwhile, Pritchard and Malik – the two allies Jensen can trust to have his back – both call him ‘Jensen’. When Malik starts to get more familiar, it’s not by switching to first-name-basis, it’s by giving him a nickname (��Spyboy’, which he responds to by calling her ‘Flygirl’). And that’s most of why I still default to calling the guy ‘Jensen’ myself: intended or otherwise, the game is pretty consistent in that the only people who call him by his first name have a serious lack of respect for his boundaries. I can’t tell you how intentional all that subtext was, but it shines through like a beacon.

He’s not the only example either. The game never tells us that Pritchard hates being called by his full first name, ‘Francis’, but it doesn’t have to – you can tell based on the way Jensen uses it (and it’s notable that he’s ‘Frank’ to Sarif, the ‘we’re all family here’-boss of the year). It’s a great little characterisation note for the both of them.

So you can imagine my disappointment that in DX:MD, most of Jensen’s new workmates just call him ‘Adam’. Maybe you could argue that now that unearned familiarity is going the other way, since here ‘Adam’ is the double-agent sneaking around under their noses – but then, Alex calls him ‘Adam’ too, and there’s nothing to suggest she’s shady. Miller and Duncan call him ‘Jensen’, which tracks with their characters and relationships, but I’ve long since hit the point where I can’t hear people calling this guy ‘Adam’ without twitching a little. Why are you calling him that? What are you really up to, you creep?

And this is just one thing I loved from that previous game that was lacking in the sequel. Pritchard and Malik may top my list of favourite characters, but it goes on and on. Tong Senior is more charismatic than any guy that shady has any right to be (and Tong Junior is just such a fantastic little shit), and Keitner deserved so much more screentime than she got. David Sarif is a fascinating mess of completely terrible person who still deserves real credit for standing up against the 'real' villains behind the scenes. Megan's level-headed conviction that she's doing the right thing even while working for incredibly shady people fascinates me. Quinn is great in both his personalities, and I even enjoyed Kavanagh and the sleezeball that is van Brugen so much more than I had any right to. There are compellingly grey characters all over this script, and the writers deserve serious credit for all of them.

But there’s no-one in Mankind Divided I enjoyed as much as the best players from HR. Including, I hate to say it, that one DLC which brought Pritchard back at last.

So, yeah. It's time to talk that last little footnote to this game.

The System Rift DLC

DX:HR had only one DLC mission, but it set a high standard, introduced some of my favourite characters (see above!), and contributed to the greater story in a big way. By comparison, MD has three DLC missions, and all have the exact same problems as the main campaign: there’s just nothing to invest in here. Do you actually care whether Jensen is able to save an undercover agent who’s gone native in some prison facility? Not once you’ve met the guy, trust me, he’s painfully bland. And that mission may actually be the strongest of the three.

The story justification for System Rift is as perfunctory as possible. Pritchard calls Jensen up out of the blue to call in a favour. He needs Jensen to recover some data from a bank vault, and along the way, you might find some evidence of shady insider trading between characters you’ve never met. And you have to ‘save Pritchard’s avatar’ from a virtual world, because reasons, which is exactly as trite as most attempts to build cyberspaces into gameplay. Oh, and you get to ride a funicular elevator at one point, because that’s about the level of what we get here as a callback.

As for new characters, you'll meet Shadowchild, a hacker friend of Pritchard, who I found depressingly dull. Attempts to characterise her mostly mean sitting through dialogue like “there are only a few hackers in a world who could do this, but fortunately for you I am one of them,” delivered in a relative monotone. Much as much as I enjoyed the fact that Miller was queer only if the player is paying attention to the details, doing the same thing again with Shadowchild just makes me feel like the writers don’t have the guts to make a character gay enough to risk upsetting the homophobes in their audience. It’s executed that much worse here too (look, I fully assumed whoever Shadowchild needed Jensen to leave that coded warning for must be someone she’d long since lost real contact with, because why the fuck would she need or trust a virtual stranger to do that for her real, current girlfriend when the stakes are this high? Come on!)

But what really kills this DLC for me is that Pritchard and Jensen’s relationship is given so little to work with. They’re not working together to find the people who put Jensen in hospital or tracking down the secrets of Jensen’s past this time. We’re not getting any insights into Pritchard’s past or hunting major Illuminati secrets either, there aren’t even innocent people in danger – there’s nothing personal here, nothing to invest in. The data Pritchard wants is a MacGuffin in the purest and most meaningless sense, and Jensen’s only helping because he owes a favour (and you won’t even know what for if you haven’t read the novel).

The fact Jensen’s now working for Pritchard directly ought to add new tension to their dynamic, but all it seems to do is throw a dampener over what grudging camaraderie they ever achieved. I do like that they've reached the point where Jensen doesn't even sound like he's sneering when he calls Pritchard 'Francis' anymore, but most of their banter was underwhelming – and dull as I found the core conflict of Black Light, even it delivered on that. Jensen is a surly asshole to Pritchard for no good reason from the moment he answers the call, and the idea that he’s pushing friends away to protect them is present but (at least for my money) underplayed. Pritchard, meanwhile, is here largely to deliver mission-related exposition. There were definitely exchanges I enjoyed ‒ I'm a shipper, I can't not like Jensen's last little 'take care of yourself' at the end ‒ but it's not much to hang a DLC on.

(And to be clear, if you did love System Rift for what it was, no judgement here. But goddamn, did you deserve something you could’ve loved so much more than this.)

So with all that said, where does that leave me for a conclusion? If the plan with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was to make the series more like the original Deus Ex, then for my money, they’ve succeeded ‒ at least in that the plot is uninvolving, the characters are bland, and their relationships don’t evolve in any interesting way. But even the original DX managed some memorable reveals and a gloriously weird multiple-choice ending, where the heros could tell themselves they’d taken down the Illuminati and cured the plague. Jensen’s grand success at the end of MD is that a key UN vote on augmented rights hasn’t made the currently shitty status quo any worse. Everything that Human Revolution did well is missing here, and everything it did badly is just as bad.

And yet, at the end of the day, my single biggest disappointment may be that this really is it. There’s probably never going to be another Deus Ex game. I don’t know how you’d save a franchise from a rut like this, and it’s naïve to imagine you can only go up from here – but apparently it’d take more than one lackluster entry to kill my investment. It’s a hell of a bummer to see it end on a game that seems so ashamed of everything its predecessor ever did well.

It's enough of a bummer that rather than leave my own impressions rest there, I'm replaying Deus Ex: Human Revolution now, and you know what? Turns out it's not all nostalgia that's making me remember the last game so much better, because I'm having a great time with it all over again. The side quests you can pick up are just as truly absurd as they ever were (sure, random hooker I just met, I'll plant drugs in this guy's apartment for you!), but the stakes feel meaningful, the character dynamics are fun, and Pritchard is back being his terrible, sassy self. My absurd quest for enough XP to unlock all the cool powers ASAP has me spending way, way too long trying to set up double-takedowns and carrying vending machines around the middle of Detroit police station to try and block the sightlines between the computer I'm hacking and all the cops standing around the same room. Look, this is apparently my idea of fun, don't judge me.

For over a year now, I've had a couple of unposted bits of Jensen/Pritchard fic sitting around, never quite completed, and replaying the game has reignited the motivation to get them into some kind of shape worth showing to people. Lord knows I don't have the power to uncancel this franchise, but at least letting my own unfinished fic see the light of day is something I can do.

#Deus Ex #Adam Jensen #jensard #Deus Ex: Mankind Divided #Deus Ex Human Revolution #Deus Ex Black Light #meta

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rallamajoop · 5 months ago

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I have too many feelings about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2/3)

So we've covered gameplay and worldbuilding. The stuff on character has been deemed too long and will be split out into yet another post. For now, let's talk plot.

Plot

God, where do I even start with this mess?

Plotwise, I'd call Deus Ex: Human Revolution fine, but unremarkable. It had many problems and a notoriously weak ending, but it still delivered a decently-paced adventure with rising stakes and tension, and major reveals at appropriate intervals. The bar for video game writing at large is so low that I’d honestly rate it well above average [insert obligatory grumbling about The Witcher 3, RE4R etc here].

The scope for sequels to that story were always going to be somewhat hamstrung by that usual prequel-problem where we can’t actually beat the Illuminati, because we know they’re still around in the future. But there’s plenty that could have been done with Jensen’s story. In particular, HR’s DLC chapter has Jensen catching the interest of an anti-Illuminati hacktavist network called the Juggernaut Collective, led by the mysterious Janus (real identity unknown). Jensen’s backstory as a genetic test subject was presumably meant to be expanded upon in future too. And canon tells us that Jensen was declared legally dead after the Panchea incident at the end of the previous game, only to wake up in a facility in Alaska with no memory of how he survived. Surely that’s the perfect start point for the sequel – it even gives you the perfect excuse to reset all his augs again for gameplay reasons!

But MD does not take that perfect sequel idea. Instead, the ‘story’ of Jensen’s survival is relayed to us via Black Light, a tie-in novel that I read months ago and have so many conflicted feelings about. On the one hand the author, James Swallow, is refreshingly interested in so much aug-related worldbuilding that the games utterly ignore, and writes some genuinely great Jensen/Pritchard banter. On the other, the main ‘conflict’ of the book revolves around retrieving a smuggled shipment of leftover Sarif Industries cyborg parts, which is pretty lame even by the usual weak MacGuffin standards. With stakes like these, it's just very hard to care whether the heros succeed or fail.

Meanwhile, having set up the great mystery of the holes in Jensen's memory and how he really survived, the book delivers no answers whatsoever (and nor, I'm sorry to say, does Mankind Divided itself). Tasked also with setting up Jensen’s new double-life working for both the Juggernaut Collective and Interpol, well, the book tells us the collective comes to see Jensen and asks him to work for them, and Jensen thinks about it and then says ‘yes’. The story of how he came to work for Interpol is similarly underwhelming.

But perhaps worst of all is the title, which refers indirectly to the mysterious ‘Project Black Light’ – something which a villain significantly reads a report on in this one scene. We do not see the content of the report. ‘Project Black Light’ presumably has something to do with Jensen ‒ either the genetic experiment that created him or whatever created that hole in his memory ‒ but that’s literally all Deus Ex canon has ever told us about it. It’s embarrassing just how little meat this thing has on its bones.

Unfortunately, Mankind Divided itself would prove to be a lot like Black Light – just without the interesting worldbuilding or the good banter to spice it up.

The usual big complaint levied at this game is that it’s too short, and the story feels unfinished – presumably cut short by time and budget constraints. That first point surprised me, as I’m sure it took me as long to finish as HR did – but I’m a terrible completionist and MD does have roughly a gazillion different side quests to waste your time. As the player, I’ll do almost anything for EXP, but rationalising why a guy as busy as Jensen would waste time on this crap is dissonance city. All these distractions do nothing to keep you invested in the main plot either (which is hard enough to care about to begin with).

I’d also debate that the story feels unfinished. To me, it feels unstarted.

(Yes, that is a loading screen detailing the history of a construction firm. This is absolutely the level of excitement you can look forward to here.)

The story of MD is so uninvolving it’s an effort even to remember much of it. The augmented populace who survived the 'aug incident' are now the new world-wide pariahs, and there’s an upcoming UN vote that will ban them from living anywhere worthwhile, and some terrorists have bombed a train station for some allegedly-related reason. Jensen is sent to apprehend the leader of a pro-augmented rights group leader as a suspect, a staunch pacifist whose name I've forgotten. On the way in, though, he meets a man with a sinister accent called Viktor Marchenko, the mother of all big-ugly-heavies, so it will amaze you all to learn that this guy is secretly the real terrorist mastermind, and will later be the final boss. The Illuminati have stakes in this somehow, and are probably pulling his strings or something. Look, I’m all for stories about twisted political shenanigans, but some of that has to happen on screen to work. This is a story where you’ll hear about all that shit third hand if you’re lucky.

Possibly, the idea was to open MD on a similar note to HR, at least in that Jensen is some months into his new job when a terrorist attack leaves him and his augs back at Factory 0. He then spends most of the rest of the game trying to track down those responsible. The key difference is that in HR, the attack was a targeted assault on Jensen’s workplace, resulting in his robocop upgrades and the abduction of his ex-girlfriend. Yes, it’s cheesy, yes, it’s cliched, but it gives us personal stakes. And as the story chugged along, we’d learn that Jensen’s own DNA was behind the discoveries that led to Sarif Industries being targeted, used without his consent. Love it or hate it, it’s very much Jensen’s story.

MD, by comparison, is just a story which Jensen happens to be in. He’s only at ground 0 for MD’s terrorist attack by unlucky accident, and is barely injured. He investigates because he works for Interpol, so this shit is literally his day job. Stopping bad people from doing bad things shouldn't need justification, but in what way is this Jensen’s story? His contacts with the Juggernaut Collective help with the investigation, but the conflict between his day job and his own secret affiliations never comes to a head, or even really escalates. It's the kind of experience that makes you long for the sort of generic genre cliches you thought you were tired of.

Some token attempt is made to link Megan’s research on Jensen's DNA to a new poison being used by the terrorists – and two almost complete games in, Jensen’s personal superpowers have finally mattered by making him immune to that poison – but why on earth would they need a new poison at all? Any quick-acting poison would’ve done the same job. (A cynical answer is that the plague from the original Deus Ex was supposed to have been accidentally created during human augmentation experiments, and fans want this to be more like the original Deus Ex, right? So let's do that again! Just, you know, even worse.)

None of the other dangling plot points go anywhere either; this is a story devoid of exciting reveals. We never meet the real Janus. We learn nothing new about Jensen’s background, his amnesia, or the Illuminati’s plans for him. Various members of Interpol are either revealed or subtly hinted to be working for the Illuminati, but Jensen himself doesn't get to react to those reveals. We learn that the Illuminati hopes Jensen will uncover Janus' true identity for them, which is to say that they mention it in passing in the very final cutscene. I as the player would really like that to happen too, if only so something would happen, but as an explanation for the Illuminati's interest in Jensen (escaped research test subject with DNA apparently vital to augmentation technology) that's pretty freaking underwhelming. The grand 'villain' of Mankind Divided isn't the Illuminati but ordinary human prejudice, and no actual progress is made in defeating that either.

We do get some intriguing hints in optional side quests that the Jensen we’re playing as may be a clone of the Jensen from HR (heck, maybe the real Jensen really did die when Panchea sank, and the Illuminati decided they still had a use for him), but hints are as far as it goes. The whole universe feels like it’s treading water, desperately trying to squeeze out another installment without having to answer any real questions or advance the real plot one iota forward. The whole game feels like a filler episode.

There are good moments scattered through nonetheless. Having to decide between doing the urgent mission Interpol wants and the equally-urgent mission the Collective wants at one key moment is wonderfully tense (though the actual consequences of that choice are typically minor). Wandering around Interpol HQ talking to people who are busily trying to track down the Juggernaut Collective without a clue that Jensen's an actual Collective agent is effective too. But the pacing suffers badly from the huge number of side-quests it encourages you to waste time on, and the core cast really isn’t holding up their end.

A few side-quests actually deliver some of the game’s other best moments. There’s a cult leader living in the sewers with hypnotic powers somehow strong enough to scramble Jensen’s CASIE aug, producing a terrific sequence when some of our favourite tools suddenly turn against us. Elsewhere, Eliza’s side-quest features by far the single best moment of twisted, trust-no-one paranoia in this whole franchise, where you have the chance to spot the fact that an "ordinary" shopkeeper is actually a plant trying to bait Jensen into a trap. That reveal worked all the better for me because I missed it completely on my first run through that dialogue tree, and stumbled onto it only by accident after reloading a save for unrelated reasons. You’ll get the odd glimpse of what this game could have been with a stronger vision behind it, but such material remains few and far between.

And burying the best stuff in optional content does the game no favours. I’d been spoiled for the fact you can find what seems to be a cloned copy of Jensen’s body (or maybe even the real Jensen?) in the Versalife vault, and had naively assumed that meant it was an actual plot point. I'd never have guessed the body isn’t even visible unless you let off an EMP grenade while standing right on top of it (which you have no reason to do because there are no enemies in this room). There’s no way to get a really good look at it without using freecam mods. And so the biggest single clue to any of the mysteries still surrounding Jensen is a detail so minor I can’t help wonder whether it’s anything more than an asset leftover from cut content, shipped in the finished game by mistake.

Maybe this game really was finished in a hurry with half its intended plot incomplete. But for my money, what it really needed wasn't an extra year in development, it was the direction to tell an actual story from the start. Seriously, Jensen discovering that he died in Panchea, that he's a clone re-created by his worst enemies as a sleeper agent against his new allies? Gold. If that was even the real intent. But no-one wanted an entire game about a UN resolution to make cyborgs more oppressed ‒ and if they did, the game they delivered was not it.

A bad plot alone isn't necessarily a death-knell from my side of fandom, of course. Some of the most beloved franchises out there are pretty objectively a load of hot garbage with a few compelling characters at the fore. Some of my own most beloved series are that exactly. So I wish I could tell you that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was at least saved by its stellar characters and cast. But my thoughts on that front have yet again been deemed too long to squeeze into this post.

#Deus Ex #Adam Jensen #Deus Ex: Mankind Divided #Deus Ex Human Revolution #Deus Ex Black Light #meta

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