I’m not necessarily talking about moment-to-moment gameplay or mechanics (though I could see some interesting points being made about, for example, RTS gameplay or RPG character building influence how you approached “strategy” in your own life).
What I’m trying to get at are the games you felt really had something to say.
For example, while I’m by no means the biggest fan (only ever played 2 and V), playing MGS V recently (and catching up on the background a bit) has created this sense in me, and I wondered where else one might have experienced that from vidya
It's a great game. The story is S tier. If I were you I'd bump it up the queue.
You have to protect a feminist protest. 0/10.
My fucking god, you actually got me to sign in to respond to this. That's some SSS-grade shitfaggotry.
Anyway:
Out of a 100+ hour game, this is a tiny sidequest that is over in about five minutes.
The whole time you're driving the suffragette wagon, Arthur is poking fun at how absurd the whole notion is when people have real problems out in the west.
Some NPC townies ALSO take offense to the rally, and shout it down. You can choose to pick a fight with them, or to just leave.
It's never fucking brought up again, because it's just some stupid shit you did for money in chapter 3 while trying to lie low in a new town.
Oh, and just for fun...
Ex) You can meet an actual feminist protestor in St. Denis. You can agree with her, laugh her off, or insult her. You can beat her up, with fists, melee weapons, or your firearm. You can shoot her. You can set her on fire. You can blow her up. You can drag her behind your horse until she dies. You can tie her up and drop her on train tracks. You can even tie her up and toss her to the gators in the surrounding swamps, who will actually eat her.
So, on whatever turbo fucking retard scale of glue huffing crayon munching you operate your one-track "hurr durr all wxmxn are SATAN" withered bean of a mind on, the game doesn't have a fucking feminist, "pro-women" agenda.
Just a correction here, Arthur says the whole thing almost bothers him to vote (in favour of the feminists). He pokes fun at the absurdity of the event, but still for some bizarre reason favours the feminists. Just like for some bizarre reason he becomes extremely surly with a former slave owner, because for some equally bizarre reason -- despite being back in late 19th century -- he believes in racial equality?
The game is a technical masterpiece, but it's littered with jarring anachronisms pulled directly from modern day Left-wing belief systems. Arthur -- in many cases -- acts like a vassal for their talking points, and players are beholden to those same talking points. Such as constantly praising Sadie as the "bravest" of them all (and for some other bizarre reason, Sadie -- who was once a housewife -- somehow takes over the gang while the main leaders are trapped on an island).
If the game had stayed true to its time period like the originals, it would have been a 10/10 masterpiece. And while Imp singled out the feminist quest -- which rubbed me in all the wrong ways since you can't skip it, or disrupt it in any way -- all the other small elements of Lefty-talking points seeping into the game made it highly despised in my view. Especially after the 20% story mark or whatnot where almost everything out of everybody's mouth regarding Whites is disparaging.
I love the mechanics, but I will never play that game's story again.
Friend, I think you sort of missed the forest for the trees, here.
Remember that Arthur has spent his entire life as an outlaw with a heart of...say, tarnished silver. His big concerns, at the stage of his life where the story takes place, are the disappearance of a place in the world for him and his family (the gang), the massive expansion of the power of the federal government, and his fears of losing his freedom and being locked away.
He thinks women voting is weird, but he ends up tacitly supporting those specific women because he ends up convinced they are trying to get their own "freedom". He gets angry at the former slave owner not because "muh negro rights", but because the man's entire fortune was based around robbing people of their freedom, and because the man is trapped in this rose-tinted vision of the past. He feels both disgust and pity for the man, but it's never because "muh racismus"; it's always because "slavery in general bad", which I don't think is a hot take.
Yeah, Sadie is...weird. On the one hand, her story comes off, at surface level, as very "yas kween slay" girl power fuck-nuggetry.
On the other hand, however, if you take the time to engage with the gang in between story missions and watch the (I think literal) hundreds of small storylets and interactions that play out in the camp, you actually see her go from near catatonic rape victim to asking for a gun and training on how to use it, to being one of the regular gun hands and guards for the camp, to slowly edging away form the gang as things start to fall apart later on.
It's absolutely the game's fault that this shit appears to come out of left field; if you don't watch Sadie's story play out, her sudden shifts seem like they're pulled out of someone's ass. But they do justify her involvement, and they never have her do the usual "small woman defeats big, burly men using spin kicks" bullshit you generally see in "girl power" moments. She just has her own heroic adventures and gains her own levels, all without Arthur's direct involvement.
I've got a 100% save file at this point; can you give me a point in the main plot about this? Because, outside of one or two interactions with Lenny early on, I cannot for the life of me recall any "DAE hate da hwites?" bullshit. And I've been through the game thrice to see the differences in character interactions between max, mid, and min honor.
Here's something for ya
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex10r7R3NcY&list=PL5s_NMmWpCmnBz0SyLcRhfy0q9Orx0H59&index=4