For the past month I have been playing Just Cause 2 alongside The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It’s been an interesting experience because it has highlighted similarities between the two. Just Cause 2 is one more game applying a Grand Theft Auto framework to the West interfering in the affairs of other countries, but at moments it is also the closest predecessor I have played to the feeling of exploration in Breath of the Wild and its sequel. Its sense of freedom is directed to different ends, however.
Developed by Swedish studio Avalanche for the now Square Enix-owned Eidos, Just Cause 2 is broadly a more fully-realised version of what Mercenaries 2 did to reasonable success a couple of years earlier. It’s set in the fictional South East Asian country of Panau rather than Venezuela, but similarly has you as a representative of a nebulous agency, teaming up with assorted anti-government factions and generally blowing up as many things as you can to destabilise the regime. This is needed because someone is “not dancing to Uncle Sam’s tune” as it says in the intro, alongside an ironic, but not ironic enough, use of “the natives are restless”. The interference even turns out, just like in Mercenaries 2, to be all about oil, popular safe ground at the time for tepid criticism of US foreign policy.
You get the use of lots of different guns, you can steal all kinds of vehicles with the standard tap of the Y button, and there is military hardware galore to face off against and get hold of. A lot of the quite repetitive missions involve elements of escorting other people to places, but mostly that’s just to keep you in about the right place at the right time and doesn’t assert any additional challenge in keeping them alive. The shooting feels as well done as in anything similar, and all of that works alright, but not to any particularly inspiring extent.
There is something which sets Just Cause 2 apart, though. There are soft James Bond vibes to its title screen music, and your character Rico Rodriguez has his own bit of fantasy gadgetry to match: an overpowered grappling hook. Point to anything solid and within range with your crosshair, tap LB, and you get immediately whisked over to that spot. You can even get inventive with joining things together at each end of the line, even if the main demonstrated use is for rescuing beached cars. The ability to get around so rapidly immediately makes battles a much more fun prospect, even before the fact that you can also use the grappling hook to send high-up enemies plummeting to their doom, or to hijack the helicopters sent to attack you.
Rico doesn’t just have a hookshot, though, but a glider to go with it. Well, a parachute. Grapple to something far away, open the parachute as you accelerate, and you get slingshotted up into the air. It doesn’t descend fast, so if you get above everything you can float along benignly for a while admiring the scenery, as encouraged by the camera pulling back and the music gently stepping up to serene. Get closer to the ground and you can point the grappling hook downwards to drag yourself forward and back up, swinging through the world like an inverse Spider-Man.
Panau is huge, and setting out on expeditions to new places in it is frequently very enjoyable. See a distant mountaintop, and you can swing and glide your way there in a short time, but not so short that it doesn’t feel like an interesting journey, generally with an opportunity along the way to watch some beautiful shimmering water in the sunlight. That’s where the similarity to modern Zeldas comes in. Just Cause 2 gives you a map of the whole place from the start, but it’s mostly marked only with unlabelled dots, so there is at least some of the same sense of ongoing discovery, alongside the sense of vast wilderness-traversing adventure.
What it does with this exploration is another matter. Often the places you come across are military bases, with some hidden collectibles and highlighted bits to blow up as increasing numbers of soldiers try in vain to keep up with you. You have to blow up a lot of things quite repetitively to unlock missions. Sometimes the places you find are villages, where you’ll see at most a couple of people who make generic scared comments as they run away from the gun-and-wire-toting maniac on the loose. In between, the wilderness doesn’t reveal itself to be packed with life and nature, but just big and empty.
When you carry out missions for some of the rebel factions, they will talk about the great service your destruction is doing for the people of Panau. But the people of Panau are barely a presence in the game, leaving a disconnect. You hear more from the voice of the regime, in the form of a radio announcer who reacts to your actions with over-the-top reassurances of normality (my favourite line was blaming some explosions on “a previously unknown, benign and very inactive volcano. Which has now disappeared”). Where the oppressed people do get involved, Rico and allies are downright dismissive of them and their country. “I’ve seen some dumps in my time, but this place…” is an early comment, and at one point after paying an informer he gloats that “considering the value of the Panuan buck, shooting you would have been more expensive”.
This is 2010, and some of the worst potential aspects are avoided. The people of Panau speak in a wide and un-coordinated variety of Asian accents, and most sound transparently like Brits putting on voices, but they are at least played by actors with Asian heritage. It’s almost certainly for the best that the country stays fictionalised. Still, the model of the powerful outsider coming in and enjoying all the benefits of the place while being completely dismissive of its people, taking whatever he likes along the way, is inherently colonial.
The level of praise lavished on Rico by rebel leaders makes the saviourism feel particularly acute, casting them as passive and helpless without his outside assistance. Some of that is inseparable from the power fantasy of the genre. Just Cause 2 poses the question of who would win in a fight between a well-developed and fortified nation state and one grapply boi, and right from its conceptual starting point the answer can only ever be the latter. Much of the same applies to Zelda as Link drops in on other cultures to fix their problems, albeit at a further fantasy remove. There’s tourists and then there’s tourists, though, and Just Cause 2 loops its freedom right into cynically doubling down on its worst aspects.
Top of the charts for week ending 27 March 2010:
