Any fans of Front Mission 3 here? I was thinking about that game today and it was (memory is a bit hazy) kind of progressive on China.
In how well a late 90's early 2000's game could be. But I remember the Chinese pilots being sympathetic and had character and the machines manufactured in country were capable, kind of blowing apart the myth of shoddy Chinese construction.
i haven't finished it yet because the controller i use on pc for emulators is broken. i do remember that there are like 2 significantly different campaign playthroughs depending on some dialogue choices in the early missions, there might be other choices as well. i think it determines which of the major political factions you work for in the campaign, and i'm pretty sure one of them features an ally/protagonist/party member that works for the Chinese who recruits you and your friends, who so far has been portrayed as an ok/good guy. front mission games from what i've played tend to be fairly pessimistic about any political faction i think, similar to Ace Combat kind of vibes. Left Behind (technically part of the series i believe) is the closest to having a clear-cut badguy faction and i haven't finished it yet either (the on foot 3rd person stealth is just not very good, not enough robot missions but the robots are super cool when they show up) but i think it was leading up to revealing that the situation is less obvious than it seemed.
Yeah the FM games where always kind of in a grey area about nations and bad guys. I just thought it was a neat point in a video game world where Chinese are usually bad guys.