There’s a tendency to label video games as the most “immersive” medium due to their ability to be able to put the player in direct control, an active participant in the world they ask you to occupy. This “immersive factor” hinges on how well the game can pull you inside of itself, and how well it manages to keep you close, so as to not break the illusion otherwise it’ll risk breaking itself. I think the issue with this line of thinking is that it doesn’t take into account just how fluid the medium really can be, that in these endless discussions of how the mechanics take advantage of the medium we tend to miss when other aspects of a game can do the same. Ace Combat 04 is unique in that regard, where the strength of its narrative isn’t derived from how well it’s able to keep you close but from how far it can distance itself from you, trying to find the perfect balance.

There are no heroic speeches that tug on your heartstrings, no third-dimensional complex characters you can chew on. It’s the opposite, all of the characters remain enigmatic. You don’t get to know these people, you’re not allowed to, and that’s precisely why it works. Shattered Skies strips them down to less than the bare minimum, it’s all still pages narrated by a man reminiscing on a time long forgotten; people who history erased from its own books. All that remains from that era are melancholic memories as you hear the emotions layered around each word spewed by the narrator.

It’s precisely because of this aspect that the actual gameplay part of Ace Combat 04 feels like such a letdown. As the hours go on each mission feels less and less like it’s complementing the narrative and more like it stands separate, as the lines between each mission blur in my head and it all becomes a big giant mashup of all the score attacks the game throws at you. The repetitive “get X amount of points in a given time” approach to mission design can only stay fun for so long, and it just feels like I’m going through the motions until the next cutscene.

It just feels disappointing coming from the previous entry, Electrosphere, a game that just barely managed to balance its massive scope. Shattered Skies is simpler, it’s shorter, and by all accounts it should be more varied, yet I’m struggling to remember what Mission 10 of Ace Combat 04 even was. Despite that, it’s been months since I finished this little game and every once in a while I’ll remember it and start thinking deeply about it, the only reason I’m writing this is because it’s made a place in my head. I feel like the narrator with all my memories going hazy, and the only thing that remains is an inkling, as I remember what I once felt.

𝘼𝙉𝘿 𝙎𝙊 𝙄 𝙒𝙍𝙄𝙏𝙀 𝙏𝙊 𝙔𝙊𝙐...

truthfully, i finished this game weeks ago, and truthfully i still find myself stunned on what to say.

the final stretch of this game is so absolutely magnificent that so much of my gut wants to rate this a 5/5. the final two chapters, and the post credits scene, are beyond stunning. they encapsulate the story beyond measure, leave me full of love and melancholy and feelings so full i don't know what to do with them.

but my brain knows this is not a 5/5. there are some biiiig flaws to this game that i just can't deny. some, if not most, of the new characters feel a little underdone, their stories rushed or cut off or just not as good as i know they could have been with a longer story. the engine's combat is just not for me, there's only so much ragdolling hilarity before i wish enemies would just sit still whilst i crush them LMAO

some bigger feelings i would have towards this game would realm too into spoilers for this review, but all in all, this and yakuza 5 are, to me, the Ultimate Kiryu Kazuma games. they are so good at dissecting him and showing him to be a man so full of flaws, and a man you just want to be happy. he is so beautiful, and after Y6 i think about him a worrying amount. he used to not be in my top5 yakuza characters and now he's battling it out for number 1. he really did it. i love him. he is the reason my heart screams for this to be 5/5 stars!!! kiryu!!!! !! aaaaaaaaaa!!! !!!! !!!

Before this review starts, I would like to preface that this is by no means an actual, in-depth critical review of Max Payne 3. I won’t be touching the story or gameplay AT ALL in this, so let that be warned. This is purely about how I feel about Max Payne 3’s portrayal of my region of Brazil and how it affected my enjoyment of it to the point where I just can’t really stand it and think it is one of the most racist video games ever made. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that Resident Evil 5 is frequently cited as a super racist video game when Max Payne 3 is literally right there and does the exact same things that game does!

The average person who played Max Payne 3 will probably not bother to do an inch of research on the country of Brazil, probably thinks Rio is the capital, and believes that it is an absolute warzone hellhole where people get shot on the street constantly. This is the kind of audience Rockstar was trying to appeal to with this game. I do not believe, even for a second, that they made this game out of respect for Brazil. They simply wanted a 3rd world country to throw their white American hero into so he could shoot and kill without a care in the world, because the 3rd world is so lawless, right? They wanted to portray their weird, twisted view of Brazil so much that they even went so far as to scan a thousand residents of the favela of Paraisópolis into the game, acting as backdrop NPCs in the chapters that do take place in the favela. You can kill actual residents of São Paulo in Max Payne 3, which is crazy once you consider how the rest of the game handles this stuff. You can sit there in your little house just outside Little Rock, Arkansas, and get your greasy hands on the controller and shoot at people who were probably paid less than a penny for their faces to be plastered onto enemies. It's the most pure depiction of the average 40-something-year-old American going to a country that doesn't belong to you and killing brown people for fun!

There is so much arrogance in Rockstar's approach to developing Max Payne 3. A huge inspiration for the game was the 2007 Brazilian movie “Tropa de Elite," which is very funny once you learn what that movie is about. It's like Rockstar saw that movie as just an average cool awesome shooter romp through a favela and not as a critique of Brazil’s problems and struggle with violence. I think taking a movie that presents a very thoughtful critique of violence and using it for their little American power fantasy video game is insanely disrespectful. But it’s not like it really matters to the audience for this game. The audience doesn’t know what "Tropa de Elite" is; most of them couldn’t even tell what language Brazil speaks, and most of them probably don’t even know Portuguese is a language. It appeals to the naive, the Americans, who think going to Brazil to shoot at some mixed-race thugs is the coolest thing in the world because they can live out their little soldier hero fantasy.

The depiction of lawful Brazilian citizens, who all seem to hate gringos and be aggressive on sight despite Brazil frequently being cited as one of the most friendly countries to foreigners, is an objectively wrong, offensive depiction. Brazilians do not hate gringos; I, being one myself and being friends with a lot of gringos and foreigners, can personally attest to this. I have been around a lot of São Paulo because I live fairly close to it and there are always gringos around, and no one minds, and in fact, most Brazilians really enjoy helping out gringos or foreigners in any way they can!  Rockstar seems to have this weird, twisted idea that since it's a favela and not the clean, corporate building of the Brancos, the people are totally different. The people from the favelas are wonderful people, despite the bad hand most of them have been dealt in life: stuck in poverty, living in run-down buildings on top of other buildings, stacked up so high. They have a resilient spirit; they, to me, represent the Brazilian spirit more than any other group of people in this world, and I respect them deeply for it. I think choosing to depict these people as inherently hostile to Max, the American hero, is so disrespectful to them and their home and the culture they were raised around, and it paints a picture that is absolutely not true. I believe Rockstar chose to depict the favelas like that because it would sell. The depiction of the favelas as lawless wastelands with gangsters and thugs at every corner is the most pure evidence you could find of the ignorance of the average American writer. You can visit a country and study it, see how it is, then go home to your little flat in your little apartment and depict it in a way that would make sense to your audience, which is the American, the one you want to please because they at the end of the day give you money; the citizens of São Paulo don’t really matter in the end much at all, and their input was never needed.

Brazil already gets misrepresented by the world at large, and I am a firm believer that media can affect and alter reality and how people perceive things in significant ways. Rockstar seemed to be drawn in by the allure of Brazil that exists in the minds of only foreigners and not the actual experience of the average Brazilian. The funk, the favela, the scorching sun, the people, the beaches, the drinking, the soccer—everything that people stereotype Brazilians as is present in this game! I don’t feel proud saying this is THE game that takes place where I live, that this is THE game that is supposed to “represent” São Paulo. I personally struggled with my Brazilian identity for a long time because of certain notions and preconceptions people held and still hold against Brazilians, particularly online, which tends to get very very nasty and racist. And I cannot sit here and pretend like I am fine with the way these Americans wrote about my country and my people.

Even when you get to the real villains of the game, the Brazilian UFE and Victor Branco, the game never changes from its weird attitude towards Brazilians. Chapter 12 is literally named “The Great American Savior of the Poor,” and as ironic as Rockstar’s intent may have been while writing that, they characterize Max and Brazilians in such a way that that is actually the case! He stops the Comando Sombra, he stops the UFE, he stops political corruption, and he saves a bunch of favela citizens from getting their organs harvested. He, a white American man, really does become the savior of the poor through this game's absolutely naive and frankly stupidly racist writing. And the critique itself towards the Brazilian police and political world is absolutely shallow and warped. I mean, Victor Branco is kind of a silly caricature of a stereotypical corrupt Brazilian politician, but the game doesn’t really delve any deeper than that, and it frankly makes me quite sad. Just a few years after this game came out, Operation Car Wash started, and honestly, I wish this game had come out during that time frame so they could have developed that plot point further. But then I also worry they would’ve handled it in the worst way possible and made the most Brazilian right-wing propaganda piece video game of all time, and that thought alone sends shivers down my spine. Like Imagine in your head right now a game so right-wing Bolsonaro would probably use clips of it in his 2018 campaign. I already think the game is inherently right-leaning simply because of the way it handles a lot of the subject matter, and I honestly fear what a 2017 Max Payne 3 taking place in Brazil during the Temer era would look like...

If it seems like I have gotten emotional or angry while writing this, it is because I have! I do not live in the city of São Paulo proper; I live on the coast. But I have been to São Paulo quite often in my life due to a few of my relatives living there, and those relatives live in the parts that Max Payne 3 chose specifically to depict. It makes me sad that this is the product that was made; this is what Rockstar chose to depict of my family, my friends, and my country. To the people that live here, to the people that know and love people that live in the world Max Payne 3 chose to take place in, it is a very painful experience to go through again and again. São Paulo is really a beautiful state, and most will never ever get to experience it; only the people that have lived here would really understand how amazing and beautiful it truly can be. But to the average audience that loves Rockstar, all of this is alright and fine by them; they’re never going to feel offended, and they’re never going to have a problem with it. They’re never going to feel their blood pressure rise when the game says something so insanely racist you have to take a step back. They’re never going to wonder how their friends and family are viewed due to the negative connotations being from a favela already carried, made worse by a totally inept and ignorant development team. Because they don’t care. To the average American consumer, it is just another game set in a "shithole," a "warzone," where they get to escape their privileged realities and pretend they’re some sort of hero. Rockstar manages to reinforce every single negative stereotype about Brazil for these people. And they’re going to eat it up; they’ll believe it because they are inherently ignorant. It is a game made for Americans, not for the Brazilian people, and there is nothing more American than pretending to be a badass hero in some “shithole” where the only goal is to kill as many brown people as possible.

I have gone on a few tangents here and there, but I have stated my case. Max Payne 3 is a racist video game, plain and simple. It's not going to beat around the bush and pretend it's because Rockstar is doing it by accident because it honestly feels very deliberate. They had writers approve a lot of this stuff, and it baffles me that at no point a writer went and said how kind of messed up it all is. I will leave a single quote here that I feel perfectly illustrates what I mean by all of this:

“We’d half destroyed São Paulo’s most hallowed place of worship.” A stadium.