Why is mercer evil?
I have had great fun coming back to this game even though now that i have a laptop and the disk won't fit anywhere i had to sail the seven seas either way the game was good getting into even if it's clearly a relic of it's time the difficulty on the harder modes is basically bullet sponge pro max finishing it i was actually surprised how much more empathetic mercer was compared to his P2 counterpart the second game is somewhat controversial already but let's clear somethings
In terms of pure gameplay and mechanics P2 is better it's not game of the year or anything but the prototype games are basically famous for needing a tweak or two to be genuinely great games but without them they are just good games but in terms of story.....P2 is the clear inferior of the two now P1 wasn't Shakespeare or anything but it was a story with good ideas that wasn't executed to perfection pariah is basically a meme at this point
However it's clear from the story that mercer the virus is leagues better than mercer the human while the virus is not excellent it clearly has empathy for it's victims and the victim of mercer himself aside from pariah P1 is kind of a very self contained story it basically ends on the virus contemplating the people mercer killed what it became and accepting it wasn't human it's also somewhat framed as a search for redemption from all of this the virus in the end turns out to weirdly be the more humane version of mercer i have weirdly taken it's claim to be something less than human but also something more to be a sort of ironic admission of humanity as it being lesser is counteracted by it being more so it ends up as human
Now P2 comes along and basically turned the virus into whisker now granted the virus had moments of villainy in the first game such as killing karen even if she was a victim of circumstances i would imagine it's more fault of the writing team than the character but i also would say it shows the virus is growing as a person since it's end is basically filled with regrets there isn't REALLY a good explanation for the why in the game itself it's all in the comics i have heard a lot about them of course everyone rants in them but i never really read them so i decided to!
And uhh.....so the first thing i noticed is how short this was i read the first run released in 2009 which barely had anything to do with mercer the second run where we are interested has just six issues which is unbelievably small to get an idea the first issue is fifteen pages and we only really meet the catalyst of this shift in page nine (the old man and the girl) so basically half way through and then i am not joking listen to me in issue two which also has 15 pages we get the betrayal at page 12! We went to this grand betrayal from beginning to end in 18 pages! Let me tell you something we basically got the emotional climax in 2 issues! And not counting the filler an issue and less than a quarter! This is a six issue comics i have genuinely never seen writing this rushed in my life the worst part os that after this mercer doesn't even appear!
He causes the events of P2 issues 3 to 4 deal with some randos issue 5 introduces heller prison and his escape in the final issue 6 he helps two other marines escape and stuff happens long story short heller is soft with a civilian he gets knocked out by one of the marines he wakes up and we meet two characters who are seemingly set up to be important but are never seen again captian langford and colonel shawcross of blackwatch who rejects heller because he is a softie soy boy.....wow
That's it?
Genuinely that's my reaction to this the grand comic everyone moans about.... that's it? I feel like patchy the pirate in that one episode I don't even necessarily dislike it because there isn't even enough material to dislike it's so disconnected and weird i don't even know how to take it and looking at mercer in the comic i am so....confused! You ARE humanity's evil the virus is because of human evil I thought even the vrius understood that because it under mercer was an evil bastard it absorbed primarily gentek and blackwatch people it absorbed the worst humanity has to offer literal warcriminals who would kill their own mothers the guy it's emulating is a bastard who brags about making the virus ten times deadlier than before and only got cold feet once he understood it's basically a zombie virus the idea the virus which has went through all of that and still managed to be sympathetic to the life it took is the same virus that went batshit because of a girl shooting
Uhh yeah no sorry i can't buy that especially when it's being sold by the shortest storyline in mankind a bedtime story lasts longer than that it's clear the writers lost the plot entirely i heard the guys who did P2 were new i could buy that but i also heard a lot of the staff is old though it would still make sense i imagine a lot of the technical staff was the same which is why the gameplay is better but the writing staff is new which is why the characterization is out of hand and i think it makes sense in a way? The first game is credited to being written by both dennis detwiller and paul jenkins and the second only has one writer dan jolley who clealry had different ideas the comics themselves have completely different writers as well so we have fours sets of writers on one series which is uhh.....not good no hate to anyone but it's just a small gripe i had