Resistance: Fall of Man and Resistance 2 are two action-shooter games that were released on the PS3. Generally speaking, action games have razor thin plotlines and thin voice acting, but Resistance: Fall of Man, attempted to expand on their universe creation by using History Channel-esque World War II montages with a voice over. The first game was immersive and interesting, and the documentary style storytelling worked surprisingly well. However, the second game, which continues the story of the main protagonist, manages to drop the ball on the narrative, and more importantly, fail to live up to what was potentially a very interesting character development.
Often games will take pieces of history or other fiction to help generate an immediate response from the player. In Bioshock we were not only given a story that closely mimicked Atlas Shrugged, we were also given a character named Atlas, it was a nod that made the overarching world grounded in our reality, and helped push the player into the game even further. In Resistance, we get the same thing. Other than the game taking place in a alternate-post-war world, we also have a main character whose namesake not only predetermines the story’s ending, but grounds it into a reality that we can familiarize with.
Nathan Hale was an officer during the Revolutionary War and considered America’s first spy. He is most famous for the line “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” which he muttered before he was hanged by the British. Hale was well known to infiltrate enemy lines, disguise himself as a British soldier and would convey back to the American’s the British troop movements.
Lt. Nathan Hale is the protagonist from Resistance and Resistance 2. He is charged with infiltrating enemy lines to gather the information needed to take down an invading alien force known as the Chimera (another nod to fiction, the mythological beast, Chimera was said to be made out of several different animal parts. This plays into the story with a few allusions to the Chimera possibly being the first inhabitants of Earth and therefore being a mix of human and alien. Unfortunately this is never fully explained or detailed in any way). In his efforts he is infected with an alien virus. The alien virus will eventually take over his body and turn him into an alien himself, however, in the second game a doctor has found a way to inhibit the virus from overtaking him. Despite the suggestions from his officers, Hale decides to push on into the alien forces, refusing to break back to base to get his shots, effectively sacrificing himself to shut down the invading forces.
The Revolutionary War Nathan Hale is often cited as a martyr, Lt. Nathan Hale could be as well, (*SPOILER*) considering that he is killed by a fellow soldier at the end of the second game. This is a very straightforward story and it’s remarkable how Resistance 2 manages to lose ground on it. Namely, we are never given Hale’s back story, so we really don’t know why he’s even fighting in the military, he’s considered a mysterious hero throughout both games, which actually just means that the writer’s never bothered to pen a reasonable past. This makes the case for martyrdom all the more complicated if you do not care for an individual, if you cannot sympathize with their losses, it is difficult to care about their death. Hale obviously choses early on that he is going to sacrifice himself to stop the Chimera, and the writers and developers did as well, otherwise they wouldn’t have named him after a historic martyr. Knowing this, the developer’s still didn’t take the time to give Hale a sense of place or virtue. We don’t need a life story out of him, but any sign of emotion would have been nice. Even in his dying moments he is so crazed by the virus that we aren’t offered a look of worry or doubt from him, but by his killer, who seems, perhaps, to remorse slightly in his choice.
There are narrative follies abound throughout Resistance 2, like a first-time director with tons of new cameras and tricks, the game never seems to figure out how it wants to tell its story. It jumps from first-person to montage to third person so often that you’re constantly forced to reconsider whose viewpoint your seeing the story through, who the narrator is, and more often than not, what the characters are supposed to symbolize. Often in action games we’re given a series of archetype’s, and even here Resistance fails. Sure, we get the scientist that accidentally destroyed the world and is now trying to fix it, the big-mouthed fellow soldier that eventually does the right thing, and our protagonist, who, well, doesn’t fit an archetype. In the first game Hale rarely spoke, simply just fighting his way though the story as someone else narrated the events. Here, Hale won’t shut up, he has questions, complaints and directs the other troops around. But his purpose is just that, barking orders, being a badass, but never fully becoming any of these things.
Generally speaking, when writers pull from history to tell a story, they do so in a way that means something. Unfortunately, Hale’s story doesn’t mean much in Resistance and it’s too bad. It’s a classic action script that wouldn’t have taken much to make it great but in the end is unispired and sadly, uninspiring.
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