#(not *that* important but i HC that the augments were created with the help of Khan's dna and ofc genetic augmentation)

[respondedinkind]

❝ there you are. i was getting worried. ❞

last of us (show) starters || accepting

"I apologize. I should have informed you about... my absence."

Pain keeps pulsing through his veins, inside his head, in rhythm with a steady heartbeat; Khan is still standing, he won't budge, he won't break under whatever the Admiral is doing to him - not until he's freed his family, including Vega, and himself from that old man's grasp.

A pair of nostrils flare as Khan inhales, then exhales, slowly so, with his bright blue eyes focusing on the massive screen in front of him. This room, existing outside of their prison cells, is accessible to both of them; Similar to an observation deck on board of a starship, it offers a seating area as well as a massive screen to show off the night sky for them to look at in the late evening hours.

It's ironic, in a way - Marcus uses them to his advantage, causes pain both mentally and physically, tortures their minds and bodies... and yet he's offering them this room within what is the designated zone they're allowed to roam freely in, a place to recuperate, basically, until it's time for Khan and Vega to get locked up for the night once more.

He blinks, his head finally turning as he does to have his gaze linger on her instead now, an ocean meeting emeralds. A few seconds pass as silence stretches between them, accompanied by a throat working as Khan swallows; He can still taste copper at the back of his tongue, but his injuries are healing well.

"I needed a moment to..." A moment of hesitation, to form a thought. "---Reflect."

[sketchiedetails]

While I think Binary Domain is a fun action game with a great B-movie tone, I feel like its plot is trying to do way too much at once to make any of its core themes really stick.

Lemme just get this out of the way: Binary Domain is one of the funniest action games, both unintentionally and intentionally. The cutscenes have better comedic timing with their edits and performances than most Western games these days and that’s when the game is trying. There’s some jank in the game that comes across and adds another layer of bizarre humor to the overall package. If you played the game, then you know about Bo’s stare or even trying to rescue Bo at the end of the game.

It took me a while to warm up to the cast, but they’re all very likable with their exchanges and you really feel that they develop a sense of camaraderie by the endgame.

My problem with BD’s writing isn’t with the characters; it’s with the setting. I wanna say the central theme in Binary Domain is “loving someone shouldn’t change after learning they are different from you” but it comes way too late in the game to be properly expressed and the people who should exemplify that theme - Dan and Faye - don’t really have enough time to naturally develop that kind of relationship. They’re supposed to start out butting heads and that tension transitions into sexual tension and eventually love but it really only works if you keep Faye on your team from the very beginning of the game and never swap her out.

Dan and Faye’s love arc is part of my problem with the writing. Binary Domain’s setting very clearly treats robots as second-class citizens. They’re called “scrap heads” as a slur and it gets thrown around very liberally and later on people who sympathize with machines get called “scrap lovers.” It kept reminding me of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided when they tried to make “clank” a slur for augmented people. I find it weird that unanimously people are on board for treating robots so terribly. Everyone across the globe just universally agrees that robots need to be suppressed, and I guess Yoji Amada himself points this out and calls it “The Frankenstein Problem,“ where humans fear the things they create will surpass them. I get it’s a theme, but it feels like it’s half-committed. I don’t buy in a setting that everyone would completely agree on the same thing; there should have been other people in the setting to offer counterpoints to provide different takes at the issue.

On my initial run of BD, I assumed there was gonna be a point that the Hollow Children would prove that they were capable of being sentient and shouldn’t be suppressed, but no it never gets proven and the game actually kneecaps that possibility. Hollow Children are considered terrifying to people because they can pose as regular humans for decades and no one would know, even the Hollow Child wouldn’t know what they are until ... something happens? The game is trying to be like Blade Runner, but there’s no rules established to explain how people can discover if a person is a Hollow Child, and the true purpose for Hollow Children doesn’t get revealed until the very last chapter, and it doesn’t really justify their existence.

At the end of the game, Yoji Amada reveals that he isn’t really Yoji Amada: he’s a sentient AI that the original Amada created to prove to the rest of the world that it was possible and died by his creation out of fear that the IRTA would come - who better to describe The Frankenstein Problem then an actual Frankenstein’s monster? AI-Amada (AI-mada?) then proceeds to create Hollow Children because he needed to procreate like any other lifeform. His plan is to integrate his Hollow Children into the general populace and create hybrids which have both human DNA and ... Hollow Children DNA? (I’m not sure how it works biologically, but it’s interesting how this game cribs from Blade Runner and then somehow unintentionally predicts the main plot of Blade Runner 2049.)

So if Amada’s plan is to cause miscegenation between humans and Hollow Children, what is the point of creating male Hollow Children? It’s stated just before this reveal that female HC’s can conceive, but nothing about male HC’s virility. It’s shown that Amada can remotely hijack any Hollow Child anywhere in Japan, and that really doesn’t help the argument for Hollow Children since they pose a threat as potential sleeper agents.

The most important part of this reveal is that it turns out Faye is a hybrid - her father is human, and her mother is a Hollow Child. Amada captured Faye and by the time the Rust Crew reach them, she’d already been turned. Dan at this point had been stubbornly defending Faye against the rest of the Crew who automatically agree to put her down - it’s their job, y’know how it be - and a boss fight ensues with Faye leading a pack of ninja robots. The fight has moments where the player as Dan can issue voice commands saying they love Faye and don’t want to fight, but again the pacing here has sideswiped so fast and so frequently that none of this really feels earned.

There’s a recurring flashback Dan experiences throughout the game where he’s a child bashing in a robot’s face in his family’s kitchen. It’s implied that his alcoholic father beat Dan and his mother and the robot did nothing, so in a fit of impotent rage Dan retaliates on the defenseless machine. When Dan learns that Faye is a Hollow Child’s ... child, he returns to that flashback but it’s adult Dan kneeling over a battered Faye. It’s supposed to be symbolic of Dan overcoming his bigotry and accepting Faye to be as much of a person as he is; I read it as Dan being an idiot for most of his life and having an epiphany that the rest of the world should have had from the very beginning when they started focusing on robotics as their main source of infrastructure.

During my last run on Metal Gear Rising, I listened to as many of the Codec conversations as I could this time around. They offer some very detailed world building that the rest of the game itself couldn’t support at the cost of the game’s pacing. The conversations cover a wide range of topics concerning a world recovering after the fall of the Patriots. Cyborg soldiers took over as the main source of infantry in PMC’s, and the game dips into concepts about how the rules of engagement would work with cyborg soldiers, the logistics it would take to maintain a cyborg body, and the public perception of cybernetics in both a domestic and military context.

I’m not saying every game needs a codex section in their menus to explain the world and how it works (BD technically does have that via the info logs you can pick up in the game), but the setting should be internally consistent. MGR’s Codecs add flavor text to the world, but they also explain away the more gamey aspects of the setting, like why it’s important to the Doktor that Raiden collect as many left hands as he can or why some returning boss fights aren’t as imposing as their initial encounters.

Most of the time Hollow Children appear as a way to create a plot twist and shake up the story. Shindo’s right hand man was a Hollow Child and the rebel base gets attacked by a huge robot. The general at the beginning of the game who ranted about how the existence of Hollow Children was ridiculous turned out to be a Hollow Child. They exist in order to generate drama, much like how Dan and Faye’s relationship exists in order to challenge the notion that Hollow Children shouldn’t be allowed to live.

Binary Domain’s final boss turns out to be the Rust Crew’s commanding officer. I’m not sure if he states that the President approved it, but the US is going to take the Amada AI for their own purposes and kill the Rust Crew so the rest of the IRTA won’t know what happened. It’s interesting how all three games I’ve played to write these series of posts - Vanquish, Metal Gear Rising, and Binary Domain - all feature either final or penultimate bosses that are involved in some branch of the US government. Lt. Col. Burns and Major Philips are part of the Marines, and Armstrong is a US Senator. I hate to keep dumping on BD, but their plot twist just feels unnecessary and would be but it needs to happen in order for Dan and Faye to run off together and hint at potential sequels where Faye becomes a leader for Hollow Children resistance with Dan by her side.

As a piece of speculative sci-fi, I think Binary Domain has some faulty logic but I still enjoyed this game. The combat is slower and more plodding compared to the other two games I recently wrote about, but that’s the point of the gameplay. It’s a group of humans fighting machines who can be engineered to have an edge in fights where the humans have to rely on their wits and each other in order to win every battle. Also, Vanquish and MGR are Platinum titles, and every action game is gonna feel like a slog compared to a Platinum game.

I’ll have to amend my original thoughts about playing Binary Domain alongside Vanquish: you should definitely play those two back to back, but also add in Metal Gear Rising to that block. They’re all compelling action games with some interesting ideas about how war will look in the future.