![]() ![]() How does one break a neighborhood free from “oppression”? Deface a few billboards. But when the game shifts from diagnosing these ills to showing what a cure looks like, it stumbles hard. And I’m sure that it is poised to get a lot of hate from the “SJW”-hating crowd. It’s worth saying outright that after years of Ubisoft dodging the question about whether their games are “political” or not, Legion is unapologetic as it frames things like anti-immigration ideology, austerity economics, and imperialist nativism as cultural evils. Goodbye Aiden Pearce and Marcus Holloway, hello (marketing-team approved) Play As Anyone system. Instead, you’ll recruit dozens of characters from the neighborhoods of London, none of which were designed by a team of writers, artists, and programmers, but instead by the game’s complex mechanical backend (itself created by a team of writers, artists, and programmers). The twist in Legion is that, in order to emphasize the idea that fighting fascism takes collective action and not individual heroism, you don’t do any of this as a (marketing-team approved) protagonist. Whip your car around corners at speeds too fast to be safe. ![]() Get into ill-advised gun fights with cops and gangsters. Sneak into restricted areas in order to hack into databases. To do that, you’ll do much of what you did in previous Watch Dogs games: Access the personal records of anyone walking around town at the press of a button. With only a single safehouse left, DedSec (as controlled by you) needs to recruit, rebuild, and resist, taking down the pillars of this new regime and investigating who set them up and why. This shift from crypto-fascism to outright authoritarianism was buoyed by a series of bombings at the start of the game, which were orchestrated to frame the hacktivist collective DedSec and to justify a further push to the far right. ![]() Given all of that, absolute disinterest in Legion is more than deserved, and I have no interest in making the case that anyone should look past those reservations.) (It’s also doing that in a year when its Big Political Concerns have been front and center in our daily lives in resolutions greater than any graphics card can render, and a year in which Ubisoft’s authority as a studio that can opine on issues of equality and justice has been undercut by sexual misconduct cases, racism, and overall toxic culture which the company itself reports has made one-in-five employees feel disrespected or unsafe in the last two years. Yet, Legion itself is being sold on the merits of its own whiz-bang technology, one that replaces (or at least supplements) a human touch with systemic, procedurally generated storytelling. Yes, in its best moments, the game is able to skewer the powerful for leveraging technologies of surveillance, control, and violence to address socio-economic problems instead of pursuing community-driven, human-first solutions. This idea-that leveraging technological solutions to solve cultural problems will always come up short-is core to Legion, though perhaps in more ways than intended. ![]()
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