What games have the best Leftist or Leftist adjacent narratives and writing?
What games have the best Leftist or Leftist adjacent narratives and writing?
Outside of Disco Elysium, of course. Looking for games with great narratives and some level of Class Consciousness.
Bonus points if it plays well on Steam Deck!
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I think the original FF7 had a storyline that was quite radical (before it goes completely off the rails). A bit naive and adventurist, sure, but Community Development & Mutual Aid Organiser: The Game™ is a pretty niche genre to be honest.
Minor to moderate spoilers ahead for a game that's probably older than you are, I guess?
The big evil corporation that's literally sucking the life out of the planet, the very obviously stratified initial setting that is very Battle Angel: Alita-style (how tf that story got a Hollywood remake is beyond me), the CEOs that don't give a fuck, the military-industrial complex, the pseudo-CIA, the mining town that was destroyed and turned into a slum which has relocated beside the glitzy overdeveloped Disneyworld-cum-Vegas casino city... what I like the most in the storyline, in a thematic sense, is Wutai and Rocket Town - both are frankly kinda boring in the game itself but you have Wutai which is sorta post-WWII Japan/sorta Century of Humiliation China which has become a tourist town that is trapped between two worlds and it's just kinda wrecked by the aftershocks of war, then you have Rocket Town where Cid has a crisis of conscience, where he has to confront the fact that he can't just keep his head down and be apolitical in his own pursuits - he has to confront the fact the big corporation doesn't care about him, his town, his aspirations, or the people and that he is disposable to the corporation, just as the entire world is, so he cannot opt to be neutral.
There's the obvious stuff about eco-terrorists and Tifa and Barrett fighting for Marlene's future as well as the hippie eco-village too, of course.
Idk it's just interesting to me that the setting of FF7 is mostly a mix of near-future sci-fi dystopia, a huge amount of slums for a game which do not feel at all cookie-cutter or repetitive, and a lot of backwards, bucolic towns that are usually semi-screwed by the after-effects of war or underdevelopment and so they are nice in a sense but they're also varying degrees of fucked.
The next time we would see anything near this degree of radicalism in a FF narrative would be in FFX which is very anti-religion in its message but given that the setting is basically The Catholic Church At The Peak of Its Power (except an eclectic mix of mostly-East Asian religions and culture as inspiration) then the radicalism in the message is more anti-feudal(ish) than anything more modern.
FFX is explicitly anti leftist in that it forces you, who is presumably a leftist, to play blitzball.
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I will Waco my ass before the totalitarian government forces me or my nonexistent children to play blitzball.
How they made such a goofy sport/minigame the centrepiece of FFX, which inarguably takes itself very seriously, is a baffling choice that you'd only expect to see from a non-western game studio.
How they mostly managed to stick the landing on it is even more baffling to me. And that's speaking as someone who has played enough blitzball that if I had dedicated enough time to actually playing a legitimate sport I'd be an expert.
For the Final Fantasies of that era, 7 had pretty incongruous goofy contrasts which felt very much like shifting gears and you sorta get primed for the transition when it comes to the casino or crossdressing and going to a love hotel and so on, whereas 8 was almost entirely devoid of anything genuinely goofy because it is uncharacteristically dour for the series, and then you have 9 which went in completely the opposite way and was routinely goofy to the point that it was notable for being downright whimsical a lot of the time.
I've only played Tactics, so I have been meaning to give the main FF series a try. Thanks for the rec!