Just Cause 2’s last two story missions really feel like they aren’t done. Honestly, so does the third to last one. That one’s also weirdly brazenly racist. This is a regime change sandbox so it’s not like racial sensitivity was ever going to be one of Just Cause 2’s strengths, but having a set of Chinese, Russian, and Japanese villains with, uh, accents was certainly a choice. The American protagonists aren’t really characterized any better but they are characterized sympathetically, in that it seems like we’re meant to think of them as devilishly charming rather than unhinged psychopaths. Doesn’t really stick the landing for me, though, so maybe that was the point, everyone here is utterly psychotic and we’re only working for the Americans because we started this series in 2006 back when being unironically pro-regime change was a fairly uncontroversial opinion.
But more to the point of the article, you settle up with the three national powers behind the communist Reapers, mafia Roaches, and fascist Ular Boys, who are respectively the Chinese, the Russians, and the Japanese. You might think that the Japanese are a weird choice since they’re a US ally and the protagonists are explicitly American, but don’t worry about it. The Russians and the Chinese were a reach in 2010, too, even if it’s hard to remember that in Current Year. I’m off-track again, the point is that these three international powers are backing three rebel factions you’ve been helping against the rogue state government, and for some reason the protagonists aren’t okay with that even though we’re doing the exact same thing, so we take all three of them out. Luckily for us, they’re all headquartered out of the same hotel.
This seems like it was probably originally supposed to be a thing where once you completed some percentage of a faction’s missions, you would unlock a mission dealing with one of the international benefactors. Maybe the one associated with the faction whose missions you’ve completed, so if you help the commies out they will eventually tell you where to find the Chinese, or maybe there’s a little loop, where the commies point you to the fascist-backing Japaense, the fascists point you to the mafia-backing Russians, and the mafia point you to the communist-backing Chinese. Then after completing all three of those you would unlock the next story mission. But, nah, you take out all three of them in one mission which you unlock by racking up enough chaos points, and completing faction missions is one source of chaos points but you can also ignore them completely to instead blow up oil pipelines and water towers.
In the second to last mission, you pick one of the three factions to help you kill the dictator. It’s implied that this is going to be some kind of important choice, but its only impact is which mooks follow you up the hill to the dictator’s bunker. Then the last mission’s intro voice clip says you need to take out oil tankers from Russia, China, and Japan headed towards Panau’s oil fields so that America can get all the oil for ourselves, but then the dictator turns out to be alive in a nuclear submarine, launches nukes at all four of his enemies, and you disable the nukes headed towards Russia, China, and Japan (all of whom apparently have no air defenses whatsoever and cannot intercept a single missile), then reprogram the missile targeted for America to blow up the oil field and thus eliminate the resource that all the international powers were squabbling over.
The last bit is the best writing the Just Cause series has had so far, which isn’t much of an achievement but hey, it’s something, but these last couple of missions heavily feature picking between the three revolutionary factions and interacting with their international backers and then it swerves into fighting the dictator again (no explanation is given for how he survived the storming of his bunker when he got blown up by a grenade – somehow Panay returned, I guess). The nuclear submarine climax is fine, but why set it up like the finale is gonna be an international free-for-all instead of just saying oh, shit, a nuclear submarine, he’s gonna nuke Tokyo and Beijing and…well, considering the ranges of sub-launched ballistic missiles in 2010, Moscow is a stretch and New York is right out, so Vladivostok and Honolulu, I guess. That’s a really petty nitpick, though, it’s a Just Cause game, the climax involves clinging to the missiles in transit in order disable three of them and reprogram the last one using a keypad attached to the side of the fuselage, it’s fine that there’s a nuke aimed “at America” without worrying about the details. The important point is that everything to do with international backers behind the revolutionary factions comes to nothing and if they didn’t want to have that actually go anywhere (and fair enough, it would’ve required a lot of extra assets to explore that in any kind of detail) then just don’t bring it up. Why are we even trying to defang the international backers behind the revolution? The revolution is on our side! Sure they’re a bunch of shady psychopaths, but so are we!
Chamomile Has A Blog 