@s10129107 said:
Fighting against the alien race with a nebulous background. The reapers / the hive mind / the pods all share similar threads but the Reapers and the Pods are almost identical both as devices and as characters. They are all the shit your pants unstoppable force that only Gordon / Shepard / Chief can lead us through. The pods and the reapers are even visually similar.
I don't really see what you're saying here. Sure, they have some similarities because they're all sci-fi games made in the same decade, but it really has nothing to do with your overall messiah story. In fact, those settings differ considerably. HL2 takes place in a police state where the bad organization has already won, Mass Effect largely takes place in friendly territories and there's an entire first game where no one even believes there is a real threat, and Halo has similarities to Mass Effect's setup except with the addition of the Covenant who are misguidedly making things way harder. Halo and Mass Effect have some overlap in their destructive alien races, but the Combine have more in common with something like the Borg than the Reapers.
I'm gonna be unfair and start some of my arguments from HL2. Chief was plucked out of stasis to fight the Covenant and figure out the Halo rings. Shepard was plucked the Military to be the Human Spectre and solve the mysterious mystery of the mysteriously mysterious husks. Gordon was yanked out of wherever the hell he was to fight the Benefactors. It feels to me like the Immaculate Conception story beat. Here's the Messiah being born. It might be a little more profound in Halo where you emerge from the Cryo pod and HL2 where the GMan plops you into city 17.
The Immaculate Conception is actually just the idea that from the moment he was conceived, Jesus was free of original sin, so I assume you're more referring to the virgin birth of Jesus, which is a separate concept. Getting back to your examples, how do they mean anything at all? Very few video games aside from like Fallout 3 and Assassin's Creed 3 tell the entire life story of the main character, because in most cases, why the fuck would you. Every game starts pretty close to the moment when your character is suddenly needed for some great adventure, because the game IS that adventure, and why would you show any other part but the interesting part? Games contrive all kinds of story reasons for your hero to be taken from their everyday life and suddenly become inexplicably important and central to the story, but that doesn't make every video game protagonist a messiah figure, it just makes them a hero. In Ocarina of Time, I'm sure Link's life in Kokiri Village was pretty boring prior to Navi coming to get him, but that doesn't make him a Jesus figure. The stasis of Master Chief and Gordon Freeman is just a convenient excuse for the writers to not have to fill in what the hero has been doing between adventures. In HL2 in particular, it's nothing like a virgin birth, because Gordon does have past exploits, and they're referred to pretty frequently. Overall, what you see as the virgin birth, I see as the call to adventure, and basically every game has it.
I also think that the uncovering Silent Cartogopher, the Alien artifact with "the visions" from Mass Effect (and to an extent the first meeting with Sovereign) and the accident at Black Mesa are similar events that lend to similar overall themes (maybe even the writing on the wall in AC although i'm really not going to talk about AC that much as i stopped at 2). Its that massive introduction and exposure. It feels to me like stepping out of the Vault in Fallout 3 felt. Its the feeling of "theres a much bigger wider world than I thought and a much bigger mystery than i thought".
I don't really get what you're going for. Most sci-fi/fantasy games tend to have a moment where they try to hook the player with some mysterious, awe-inspiring shit that is going down in their original setting. It's called writing. There are about a zillion games I could describe as "some big crazy event in the beginning of the game is the impetus for the player to explore the world and solve mysteries".
The repeated references to Gordon as "The one free man". This is a Jesus metaphor just like Halo and Mass Effect. Savior who will sacrifice himself at the end (what do you wanna bet) along with Alyx and a passi of followers that revere him (apostles) and the large establishment enemies who persecute him (Romans). Masterchief has the same thing going (Cortana and all the Marines) , so does Shepard. The Resistance, the UNSC and the Alliance all serve very similar functions.
I already covered the "One Free Man" thing. Gordon isn't special because he's some magical chosen one, he's special because of all that hard work the player did in HL1; Gordon/the player earned that respect. Yes, the Vortigaunts revere him, but largely because they appreciate that he freed them by killing the Nihilanth. He saved their entire people, so specifically, yes, he is literally their messiah, but he's not the Jesus kind of messiah where your death/resurrection is critical to you saving everybody. If you really want to make a tortured analogy, I guess that makes Gordon into Moses and the Vortigaunts into the Jews or something, but that's not even the metaphor you're trying to argue.
It's a goofy plot device, but the reason all the humans in the resistance are so stoked that Gordon is back and they think he can help overthrow the Combine is because he's the fucking John McClane of Black Mesa, and single-handedly did tons of shit when Black Mesa went bad. Everyone thinks he's a badass who overthrow alien aggressors because you spend all of HL1 BEING A COMMANDO BADASS WHO OVERTHROWS ALIEN AGGRESSORS. Aside from that, you're referring to a completely hypothetical ending to the Half-Life series/trilogy that may never exist. And I really don't think Eli Vance, Alyx Vance, Dr. Mossman, and Dr. Kleiner somehow correlate to the 12 Apostles, especially given that Gordon is a solitary traveler that is never around those characters for more than like 2 minutes at a time. Sure, Mossman betrays you (if you wanted to pick an obvious Judas figure), and then it leads to the crucifixion/sacrifice of EXACTLY NO ONE, then she's back on your side like an hour later. Your criteria are so loose that basically any game with allies could suddenly be a metaphor for having apostles. In Twilight Princess, Link meets up with this group of like 4 NPCs who are part of this resistance group; Link must be a messiah because those are his apostles! :/
I agree that all 3 series share some incredibly broad story beats common to a lot of sci-fi video games, and that Mass Effect and Halo especially accidentally converged because they both rely so heavily on their "precursor race that was powerful they could wipe out all life in the galaxy" bullshit. But I'm really not seeing HL2 as making Gordon a messiah, as much as he is the hero. He's constantly involved in important world changing events, but largely because the G-Man is manipulating things so Gordon can be "the right man in the wrong place". The implied reason for this is that Gordon is a useful tool for the G-Man because he is resourceful and persistent. It remains to be seen whether he saves the entire galaxy/dimension, because we don't know how far Valve will take it in terms of Gordon single-handedly destroying the Combine, and whatever other threats he may encounter.
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