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Raul Menendez is a Protagonist

I

Imbarkus

As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
Actually I don't really think that. Provocative! But consider...

Double tap. Drone attacks and international outrage. Drug Wars. South America and its America-supported regimes turn against us just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Anonymous. Hacker groups challenging the government while covert military assets are deployed to find them. Occupy. Inequity that appears to be enforced by the courts, banks that are "to big to prosecute." Aaron Swartz. Government and business start flexing power and removing civil rights to enforce the status quo, end up producing martyrs, and stimulate more rebellion. China. Hostilities increase, with Japan as a catalyst, and another military build-up that can't be afforded spurs more unrest. Cortis Die.

I'm actually really surprised. Took a lot of balls to go this way with it. Playing as the American soldier-hero through all this felt ironic at times. All but one of the endings was pretty much doomsday for America.

Didn't expect it from a Call of Duty. Treyarch owns this franchise now. Because of their big-ass balls.
 
I

Imbarkus

As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
Voice of Reason said:
Or he's just a psychopath that tries to kill everyone in his way because of what happened to his sister.
Click to expand...

I sure added to his bodycount with that level where I played AS HIM. I mean, crazy.

But I bet if we actually compared bodycounts... I don't know. David Mason sure killed a lot of dudes. I did play it right, right? ;)
 
J

Jackpot

Banned
I dislike how stories try to make a "deep" villain by making them pure in motive but fucking psychopathic in method. Raul's goals were laudable, but he still goes out of his way to kill innocents in sadistic and gratuitous manner. That isn't really relatable at all and anyone's moral values should be developed enough to cosign him to the "needs to die" pile. The difference is is that the "good guys" look pretty shitty as well.
 
A

AlexBasch

Member
I don't know if it's because it was futuristic or what, but BO2 was one of the most enjoyable COD campaigns (if you like the series, before you go "other games have better writing" since this is mostly about shooting thousands of virtual people) since 4.

It's Direct-to-DVD movie material, but it was entertaining at least.
 
X

XANDER CAGE

Member
I like stories where both protagonist and antagonist are morally questionable, so I was pleasantly surprised with Black Ops 2's script. It wasn't fantastic by any means, but I appreciated the attempts at doing something different and enjoyed the campaign's branching paths.
 
J

Jackpot

Banned
KieferCrimson said:
I don't know if it's because it was futuristic or what, but BO2 was one of the most enjoyable COD campaigns (if you like the series, before you go "other games have better writing" since this is mostly about shooting thousands of virtual people) since 4.
Click to expand...

I liked how the game did seem to actually feel different depending on the choices you made. Make all the good choices and it's a game about playing cat & mouse with a big terrorist group, make all the bad ones and it feels like a game where you get your ass kicked from one end of the world to the other in an inevitable downward spiral to rock bottom.
 
I

Imbarkus

As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
Jackpot said:
I dislike how stories try to make a "deep" villain by making them pure in motive but fucking psychopathic in method. Raul's goals were laudable, but he still goes out of his way to kill innocents in sadistic and gratuitous manner. That isn't really relatable at all and anyone's moral values should be developed enough to cosign him to the "needs to die" pile. The difference is is that the "good guys" look pretty shitty as well.
Click to expand...

The game mentioned, but didn't really show, the billions living in poverty because of this new Cold War. The whole motif of zooming into some zone in our fleet of VTOLs and then zooming away made for a weird "Strike Force Fuck You" feel. "We got our mission objective, let's leave the locals to clean up their corpses." Who was I fighting, really? Cortis Die, a global citizen uprising? Nuts to be taking that role in a game, in a series that started out with the old trusty "let's kill Nazis."
 
G

GillianSeed79

Member
CHEEZMO™;46931190 said:
I agree with the thread title.

Also he was cool so that's a plus.
Click to expand...

Yeah, he was a great character. That was until the super secret after credits thing. (Joking, but that was bad). Still, yeah, he was a great character. Blops II's story is actually what put it on my top 10 this year. Menendez is a little too all-knowing like a movie supervillain, but he succeeds as a villain because you can kind of sympathize with him. The biggest mistake fiction creators make is making the villain some two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a character that is pure evil for no reason. That's why villains like Magneto work so well if you get it right. I'm not saying Menendez is Magneto level, but he's certainly better than past CoD villains.

I mean, honestly, does anyone remember anything about MW3's campaign? I'm struggling even to remember who the villain was even though he had been present in the past two modern warfare games.
 
I

Imbarkus

As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
Jackpot said:
I liked how the game did seem to actually feel different depending on the choices you made. Make all the good choices and it's a game about playing cat & mouse with a big terrorist group, make all the bad ones and it feels like a game where you get your ass kicked from one end of the world to the other in an inevitable downward spiral to rock bottom.
Click to expand...

..and by a full citizen's uprising that you probably deserved. Nuts, like I said.

The only bummer was the game had such a
buddy movie
vibe that I fell for making the wrong choice in that instance (you know the one I mean) which had a totally random but crucial effect on whether the future was fucked or not. Arbitrary.

I preferred the other choice of whether or not you fell for the deception (you know the one I mean). Not arbitrary.

GillianSeed79 said:
I mean, honestly, does anyone remember anything about MW3's campaign? I'm struggling even to remember who the villain was even though he had been present in the past two modern warfare games.
Click to expand...

Makarov? Um. No, wait, was it his son? Crap. I just know I really wanted to kill him and doing so was a really long drawn-out affair with a glass rooftop and a... helicopter?

Also, didn't an EMP get set off in MW2 that meant MW3 should have been fought with spears and bow-and-arrows? WTF?
 
A

AlexBasch

Member
Jackpot said:
I liked how the game did seem to actually feel different depending on the choices you made. Make all the good choices and it's a game about playing cat & mouse with a big terrorist group, make all the bad ones and it feels like a game where you get your ass kicked from one end of the world to the other in an inevitable downward spiral to rock bottom.
Click to expand...

Imbarkus said:
..and by a full citizen's uprising that you probably deserved. Nuts, like I said.

The only bummer was the game had such a
buddy movie
vibe that I fell for making the wrong choice in that instance (you know the one I mean) which had a totally random but crucial effect on whether the future was fucked or not. Arbitrary.

I preferred the other choice of whether or not you fell for the deception (you know the one I mean). Not arbitrary.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that choice was brutal. I picked up the "better" choice for Mason rather than the "right" one. :/

I gotta admit, when I had control of the other side, I did my best to fuck Mason's path.

GillianSeed79 said:
I mean, honestly, does anyone remember anything about MW3's campaign? I'm struggling even to remember who the villain was even though he had been present in the past two modern warfare games.
Click to expand...
Mechasuits.
 
E

Emperor Bohe

Member
It was an enjoyable campaign, no doubt. They should bring back Kiefer Sutherland's character from World at War as a old ass man hahaha
 
P

Poltergust

Member
...What game are you guys talking about? I'm gonna make a wild guess and say Spec Ops: The Line, even though I barely know anything about it.
 
N

NinjaFridge

Unconfirmed Member
Poltergust_3000 said:
...What game are you guys talking about? I'm gonna make a wild guess and say Spec Ops: The Line, even though I barely know anything about it.
Click to expand...

Black Ops 2. Game was kinda boring. I never felt that connected to what was going on.
 
L

LemonGremlin

Member
My lasting memory of Raul Menendez is the bumbling idiot in the credit sequence. It has pretty much completely superseded his character during the campaign.
 
D

Dennis

Banned
BLOPS 2 was a solid game. Enjoyed it. Especially one of the levels was magnificent and worth the price alone.

I got the absolute shit ending though and I couldn't believe Treyarch would let the game go out like that.

Then I found out there was lots of different endings and I just got the "YOU SUCK" one.
 
S

Sec0nd

Member
It was a pretty cool guy in a pretty awful campaign. The way things panned out in my ending was weird though...
He opens his sisters grave to burn himself on in her grave. Fucking lol.
 
S

SkyOdin

Member
Protagonist doesn't mean "good guy", it means "main character". In a video game, it pretty much strictly refers to the player character, regardless of the moral compass of everyone involved. Likewise, antagonist refers to the opponent of the player characters, regardless of whether or not you agree with them.

It is certainly possible to have heroic villains (I haven't played BLOPS 2, so I can't comment on Raul Menedez), but if you aren't playing as him, he probably doesn't count as the protagonist.
 
D

DocSeuss

Member
He's a deuteragonist, or triterago--whatever the hell. Basically, you have three main characters: Menendez, Section, and Alex Mason.

The problem with Menendez is that he's written as some kind of amazing super genius, but it's never really that convincing, because he doesn't do anything particularly original. I don't think a single thing happened in that game that surprised me.

I mean, when you
shoot Alex in the face
, the game has basically been screaming at you throughout the level that it's going to happen, which means the moment itself is robbed of all power, because it's interactive, so you, the player,
are kinda fighting against that moment
.

The levels didn't feel right, the combat felt off... and every once in a while, it would have good bits. Health system was a tad off too, ruining the pacing.

Still not as good as an Infinity Ward Call of Duty.
 
T

The Awesomest

Member
SkyOdin said:
Protagonist doesn't mean "good guy", it means "main character". In a video game, it pretty much strictly refers to the player character, regardless of the moral compass of everyone involved. Likewise, antagonist refers to the opponent of the player characters, regardless of whether or not you agree with them.

It is certainly possible to have heroic villains (I haven't played BLOPS 2, so I can't comment on Raul Menedez), but if you aren't playing as him, he probably doesn't count as the protagonist.
Click to expand...

This is important you guys

Protagonist isn't the same as 'good guy'

Although one could make the argument that our conception of the term 'good guy' has changed to include whoever is the protagonist, even if they're a bad guy, so that the terms 'good guy' and protagonist become synonymous.
 
I

Imbarkus

As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
SkyOdin said:
Protagonist doesn't mean "good guy", it means "main character". In a video game, it pretty much strictly refers to the player character, regardless of the moral compass of everyone involved. Likewise, antagonist refers to the opponent of the player characters, regardless of whether or not you agree with them.

It is certainly possible to have heroic villains (I haven't played BLOPS 2, so I can't comment on Raul Menedez), but if you aren't playing as him, he probably doesn't count as the protagonist.
Click to expand...

You play one level as Raul Menendez, so it still holds true, even after hairs have been split.
 
F

fernoca

Member
And he exists too!!

KFWOVUn.jpg


Well...kinda. :p
 
M

maomaoIYP

Member
GillianSeed79 said:
I mean, honestly, does anyone remember anything about MW3's campaign? I'm struggling even to remember who the villain was even though he had been present in the past two modern warfare games.
Click to expand...

It's Makarov. I really liked the characters and the story in the MW games. I felt BO and BO2's story were a bumbling mess. Woods? Hudson? Who the fuck are these dudes? Once BO2 starts I am confused immediately. I don't remember them at all.

Also, they tell you Menendez visits Woods right at the start to give him the pendant, only go through a ridiculously convoluted plan that basically does not affect Woods in the slightest just to kill him in the end. Menendez should have just killed Woods right at the start and saved us from this mess of a story.
 
T

ThoseDeafMutes

Member
Raul Menendez is the personification of the cancer that has infested CoD campaigns. If CoD2 was like modern CoD, the story would revolve around Captain Price and some other generic shitty character nobody can remember who attempt to kill Hitler. We find out that Captain Price attempted to kill Hitler in 1936 but only succeeded in giving him a highly implausible but undeniably cool Bond-Villain style physical deformity. Ever since then, Hitler has had a personal vendetta against Price. You will play through the 1936 failed assassination, and then later in the game will try another operation to take him, which will also fail when you are SHOCKINGLY BETRAYED. During the attempt, as part of the series' increasing need to create more and more disturbing scenes of graphic violence and / or horror in stark contrast to the rest of the game's ooh-rah pro military wankfest, you tried to earn Hitler's trust by personally gassing a room full of Jews and then fucking their corpses. During this scene, Hitler launches into some faux-philosophical rant about the nature of man and war and something or other that stands up to absolutely no intillectual scrutiny but will provide cool sound bites for the marketing.

The start of the game will warn you that there are GRAPHIC SCENES and ask if you want to skip them. Nobody in the world will select yes, because the actual-adults are fine with it, and the 13 year old kids who play it all want to seem hardcore to their middle school friends.

A total of about three soldiers will ping pong into every major front of the war, launching daring commando raids that make no fucking sense and always descend into you shooting about four thousand soldiers. At one point in the game, we will jump to Hitler's perspective and discover his secret motivation for all of this - that his art-school application was rejected by a panel of Communist Jews, who also raped his girlfriend and kicked his dog for good measure. Hitler will go on an unstoppable rampage with a machette where he swallows about sixty five bullets to the face in four minutes but comes out fine, screen pulsating red and flashing a picture of his dead gf in the bottom right of the screen every time you sprint.

The Climax of the game would be a final daring commando raid with all the main characters to get Hitler before he can flee his bunker in Berlin. The Bunker will contain about four times more soldiers than it could plausibly ever fit in reality, all of which you will shoot to death, before finally reaching Hitler. As soon as you walk into the room though, the game goes into SLOW MOTION and Hitler shoots the gun out of your hand and blasts your comrades. He starts yet another fucking speech where they try to convince you that Hitler's motives were pure, and all he wanted was a bright future for all Europeans and hes just misunderstood, before your dying teammate slides you a knife and you throw it between Hitler's eyes. Cue credits.
 
N

Nairume

Banned
DocSeuss said:
He's a deuteragonist, or triterago--whatever the hell. Basically, you have three main characters: Menendez, Section, and Alex Mason.

The problem with Menendez is that he's written as some kind of amazing super genius, but it's never really that convincing, because he doesn't do anything particularly original. I don't think a single thing happened in that game that surprised me.

I mean, when you
shoot Alex in the face
, the game has basically been screaming at you throughout the level that it's going to happen, which means the moment itself is robbed of all power, because it's interactive, so you, the player,
are kinda fighting against that moment
.
Click to expand...
You actually can fight against that moment and get a different outcome :V
 
Haunted

Haunted

Member
ThoseDeafMutes said:
Raul Menendez is the personification of the cancer that has infested CoD campaigns. If CoD2 was like modern CoD, the story would revolve around Captain Price and some other generic shitty character nobody can remember who attempt to kill Hitler. We find out that Captain Price attempted to kill Hitler in 1936 but only succeeded in giving him a highly implausible but undeniably cool Bond-Villain style physical deformity. Ever since then, Hitler has had a personal vendetta against Price. You will play through the 1936 failed assassination, and then later in the game will try another operation to take him, which will also fail when you are SHOCKINGLY BETRAYED. During the attempt, as part of the series' increasing need to create more and more disturbing scenes of graphic violence and / or horror in stark contrast to the rest of the game's ooh-rah pro military wankfest, you tried to earn Hitler's trust by personally gassing a room full of Jews and then fucking their corpses. During this scene, Hitler launches into some faux-philosophical rant about the nature of man and war and something or other that stands up to absolutely no intillectual scrutiny but will provide cool sound bites for the marketing.

The start of the game will warn you that there are GRAPHIC SCENES and ask if you want to skip them. Nobody in the world will select yes, because the actual-adults are fine with it, and the 13 year old kids who play it all want to seem hardcore to their middle school friends.

A total of about three soldiers will ping pong into every major front of the war, launching daring commando raids that make no fucking sense and always descend into you shooting about four thousand soldiers. At one point in the game, we will jump to Hitler's perspective and discover his secret motivation for all of this - that his art-school application was rejected by a panel of Communist Jews, who also raped his girlfriend and kicked his dog for good measure. Hitler will go on an unstoppable rampage with a machette where he swallows about sixty five bullets to the face in four minutes but comes out fine, screen pulsating red and flashing a picture of his dead gf in the bottom right of the screen every time you sprint.

The Climax of the game would be a final daring commando raid with all the main characters to get Hitler before he can flee his bunker in Berlin. The Bunker will contain about four times more soldiers than it could plausibly ever fit in reality, all of which you will shoot to death, before finally reaching Hitler. As soon as you walk into the room though, the game goes into SLOW MOTION and Hitler shoots the gun out of your hand and blasts your comrades. He starts yet another fucking speech where they try to convince you that Hitler's motives were pure, and all he wanted was a bright future for all Europeans and hes just misunderstood, before your dying teammate slides you a knife and you throw it between Hitler's eyes. Cue credits.
Click to expand...
boom goes the dynamite

And here's the sad part: people go on the internet and not only defend this shit, but actively praise it for being a good story.
 
A

Archurro

Member
ThoseDeafMutes said:
Raul Menendez is the personification of the cancer that has infested CoD campaigns. If CoD2 was like modern CoD, the story would revolve around Captain Price and some other generic shitty character nobody can remember who attempt to kill Hitler. We find out that Captain Price attempted to kill Hitler in 1936 but only succeeded in giving him a highly implausible but undeniably cool Bond-Villain style physical deformity. Ever since then, Hitler has had a personal vendetta against Price. You will play through the 1936 failed assassination, and then later in the game will try another operation to take him, which will also fail when you are SHOCKINGLY BETRAYED. During the attempt, as part of the series' increasing need to create more and more disturbing scenes of graphic violence and / or horror in stark contrast to the rest of the game's ooh-rah pro military wankfest, you tried to earn Hitler's trust by personally gassing a room full of Jews and then fucking their corpses. During this scene, Hitler launches into some faux-philosophical rant about the nature of man and war and something or other that stands up to absolutely no intillectual scrutiny but will provide cool sound bites for the marketing.

The start of the game will warn you that there are GRAPHIC SCENES and ask if you want to skip them. Nobody in the world will select yes, because the actual-adults are fine with it, and the 13 year old kids who play it all want to seem hardcore to their middle school friends.

A total of about three soldiers will ping pong into every major front of the war, launching daring commando raids that make no fucking sense and always descend into you shooting about four thousand soldiers. At one point in the game, we will jump to Hitler's perspective and discover his secret motivation for all of this - that his art-school application was rejected by a panel of Communist Jews, who also raped his girlfriend and kicked his dog for good measure. Hitler will go on an unstoppable rampage with a machette where he swallows about sixty five bullets to the face in four minutes but comes out fine, screen pulsating red and flashing a picture of his dead gf in the bottom right of the screen every time you sprint.

The Climax of the game would be a final daring commando raid with all the main characters to get Hitler before he can flee his bunker in Berlin. The Bunker will contain about four times more soldiers than it could plausibly ever fit in reality, all of which you will shoot to death, before finally reaching Hitler. As soon as you walk into the room though, the game goes into SLOW MOTION and Hitler shoots the gun out of your hand and blasts your comrades. He starts yet another fucking speech where they try to convince you that Hitler's motives were pure, and all he wanted was a bright future for all Europeans and hes just misunderstood, before your dying teammate slides you a knife and you throw it between Hitler's eyes. Cue credits.
Click to expand...

This is great
 
T

Tzeentch

Member
ThoseDeafMutes said:
The Climax of the game would be a final daring commando raid with all the main characters to get Hitler before he can flee his bunker in Berlin.
Click to expand...
SHIP IT.

And aside from the laughably absurd xanatos gambit he implements, Menendez is a MILLION times more believable and better written than almost every game villain from a game this or last year. Compare how Treyarch handled him and the branching campaign with say, Halo 4's Didact for example.

If you just want to rag on CoD that's cool I guess.
 
T

ThoseDeafMutes

Member
Tzeentch said:
And aside from the laughably absurd xanatos gambit he implements, Menendez is a MILLION times more believable and better written than almost every game villain from a game this or last year.
Click to expand...

IDK man, I didn't play every game last year. But if you're just comparing him to other similar archetypical supervillains, it is of course likely that you will find many written worse. I found most of the antagonists in Sleeping Dogs to be a lot better handled, because it's so much more down to Earth with its concepts. This whole mindset of needing a larger than life villain is wrong to begin with, and I wish writers would cut it out.

The "one step ahead" nature of villains in these sorts of games drives me up the wall. You know you're not going to get your guy, it's only 90 minutes into the game, of course he's going to get away. But every time you get close, something happens, you're betrayed, or he expected you, or your bullet misses, and every action you take is somehow all part of his plan. It smacks of incredibly lazy writing, and acts to do nothing more than frustrate the player. The story-equivalent of rubber-banding AI, and a problem that wouldn't exist if they would stop sending you on missions whose objective is "kill the main bad guy, solve all the problems" when you're so early in the game. You catch on pretty fast that the writers are NOT being clever by having such a "genius" of a villain, and instead you just start passively experiencing the game instead of becoming invested in it. Why should I care about any of this when the curtains have fallen down and I can see that they are just sending me on the prerequisite number of missions to pad the game's length to 6 hours so they can then finally give me the conclusion?
 
T

Tzeentch

Member
ThoseDeafMutes said:
The "one step ahead" nature of villains in these sorts of games drives me up the wall.
Click to expand...
Yeah, like I said his Xanatos Gambit was absurd and rather unnecessary. But at least he wasn't blazingly incompetent and the scenario was fairly topical and the politics sort of interesting (unlike, say, all of the Modern Warfare series).
 
I

Imbarkus

As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
To be fair, my OP was more about praising ballsy themes than gushing about a well executed story. I made it right after reading about the latest exploits of Anonymous re: Aaron Schwartz.

Fuck I had no idea what this game was even about for the first half, most of the plot-affecting choices are arbitrary or laughable, it's heavy-handed and ham-fisted, and the Alex Mason twist, if you do pull against the plot, is even stupider.

So yeah, Menendez is a cartoon super-villain who uses the most improbably ploy ever to "conquer" our drone fleet, with the help of a blueberry muffin computer virus that works "extra-good" because it's made out of topical-buzzword-metal. Black Ops in particular has embraced James Bond goofiness every since the underwater military base at the end of Blops 2.

What was interesting was the fairly subversive stuff coming from the America-fuck-yeah series:

Double tap. Drone attacks and international outrage. Drug Wars. South America and its America-supported regimes turn against us just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Anonymous. Hacker groups challenging the government while covert military assets are deployed to find them. Occupy. Inequity that appears to be enforced by the courts, banks that are "to big to prosecute." Aaron Swartz. Government and business start flexing power and removing civil rights to enforce the status quo, end up producing martyrs, and stimulate more rebellion. China. Hostilities increase, with Japan as a catalyst, and another military build-up that can't be afforded spurs more unrest. Cortis Die.
Click to expand...
 
T

Toa TAK

Banned
Even though he had a weak-ass Freudian Excuse, I can still see where Menendez was coming from at times. Even though he's still crazy.

BOII's story isn't good (unless you compare it to a typical action movie), but the campaign and it's characters were handled, in my opinion, a lot better than MW3's disappointing conclusion. Including the villain (who was worse in MW2). And yeah, it's one of the better COD Campaigns by far.
 
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