I talk about video game openings a lot, and booting up Just Cause, two things leap out at me. First, the writing in this game aspires to mediocrity. I mean, Christ, the cut scene at the end of the opening mission has a hot tsundere slapping our protagonist over some unstated romantic slight from the past. A bald-faced cliche delivered unironically.
But despite the fact that this is clearly not a game you play for the story, it still opens up with a cut scene that establishes in less than two minutes that fictional Caribbean nation San Esperito is ruled by President Salvador Mendoza, Medoza is a bastard for vague reasons, and Rico Rodriguez is going to go and topple his regime on behalf of “the Agency,” which will probably work fine because this is an American game from 2006 and is therefore a universe carefully crafted to ensure that self-awareness and humility will never be beneficial traits. Then bam you are parachuting out of a plane and onto the beach to fight off government enforcers on the way to a safehouse. Not only are you playing the video game almost instantly, you also get out of the prologue and into the open world inside of fifteen minutes, the vast majority of which are spent in cool gunfights.
Getting the opening pace right used to be something that even poorly written video games got nearly perfect (Hades is even faster so there is room for improvement, but we’re under two minutes either way) without even really thinking about it. I think Half-Life was probably the start of the shift, here. Half-Life’s tram ride and Half-Life 2’s redux were both long periods of setting the mood before you got your crowbar and had at it. These were both really good, but it gave rise to much worse imitators which slowly morphed into failed film directors delivering two-hour long prologues whose only gameplay is a railroaded tutorial, dominated by cut scenes scripted and blocked by people that Netflix said no to.
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