A new Gears of War game was announced early Monday morning, Gears of War: E-Day, and for the first time in years I’m actually excited for a Gears of War game.
It’s no secret that the games industry, or any other entertainment industry for that matter, has taken a turn for the worst in recent years. You just have to look at the number of IP’s that have been subverted and sacrificed for people’s political views and anyone who isn’t involved or supportive can see the trend. That’s not to say that there should never be politics or messaging in games, films or stories… it’s just that it needs to be done well.
Story first, always.
Remember back in the 90’s and 00s, how the mere mention of watching a Chistian movie would illicit a round of scoffs and eye-rolls? The over the top moralizing, the puddle-deep story attempting to contain all that blatant messaging and propaganda? Well… just imagine that, in reverse - it’s now the other side doing it and it’s just as obnoxious.
What am I talking about? You don’t have to imagine - you can see it all around you.
The original Gears of War trilogy was fantastic, I’ve done a write-up of it before. But then came Gears of War Judgment, and that was a side-step to tell a prequel story. It got some things right, and some things wrong, but the tone was the same and it felt like Gears of War.
A few years later, Gears of War 4 came out. You could tell they were going for a different tone; it was a replenished world, 25 years after the last trilogy and everything was bright and happy and just waiting for a new end to come. The characters were young and unaware of the horrors of war, having grown up in a time of peace. Besides the tonal issues, and the choice of colour palette, they also toned down the gore and even made Gears 5 open world with two different endings, for some reason. There was also a blatant narrative error in the fact that they decided to focus on Kait Diaz instead of JD Fenix. You play as JD in the first game, but the story is very much about Kait.
Now, before anyone looses their mind - there’s nothing wrong with having a female character in the lead. It would have been fine if JD Fenix was a woman, because then she would have been the daughter of the last protagonist and greatest hero the setting had ever known. But instead, we’re following the story of the granddaughter of the first trilogy’s villain… the genocidal matriarch of the Locust horde. This is only exacerbated in Gears 5, where JD is relegated to war criminal and Kait takes the lead as protagonist.
It’s an odd choice, and a tough pill to swallow for fans of Marcus Fenix and the Gears of War franchise. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that they chose to murder JD’s character (not literally… yet) in the hopes that Kait would rise in the eyes of the audience. But the thing is, they didn’t actually raise Kait up, they just dragged JD down… so, Kait may look better in comparison, but she’s still a lame protagonist.
Now, cards shown, I never actually played the 5th game - I could only watch all the cutscenes on YouTube because I was abroad at the time (still am, actually) and I couldn’t get my hands on the game, let alone the console to play it. But, I did read the two novels that focused on Kait and from those I can attest that Kait is a Mary Sue at her finest. She stomps around, screaming at anyone who gets in her way as she breaks all the rules and does whatever she wants. The whole world revolves around her, and even Marcus Fenix, hero of humanity and badass soldier in the extreme, follows her lead. I don’t need to go into this too much, there’s plenty of video essays on why Kait is a terrible character that replaced JD.
Alongside this focus on Kait, is the fact that all the heroes of the original trilogy are still there, and still fighting alongside the next generation. JD failed to surpass his father, Kait is the granddaughter of the genocidal maniac who nearly wiped out humanity, and Del is a nobody… why are we playing these characters when we could still be playing the originals with a few grey hairs?
I think the biggest issue is the bait and switch, the fact that the fans thought we’d get to play as JD and carry on the Fenix legacy. But, not only do we not get to do that, we had to carry on the legacy of the villain as we watch the hero’s son get ignobly relegated to the sidelines as a broken man. And, to top things off, in a weird multiple choice ending for Gears 5 - JD might even die, depending on who Kait chooses to save.
Sooo basically… they fucked up Gears of War, in multiple ways, is what I’m saying.
So, and here we finally come to the meat of the matter, instead of giving us Gears 6… and continuing with this shitshow, they decided to give us a prequel set on E-Day. It focuses on Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago, right as the Locust launch their invasion. Both characters are fresh from the Pendulum Wars, they’ve both lost Carlos, Marcus’ best friend and Dom’s brother, and Dom is going to lose his kids and eventually his wife… this is going to be a hectic time for both characters. The dev’s promise that it’s going to go back to what Gears of War is all about, a gritty story about horrific monsters trying to genocide humanity. Which, after the Saturday morning cartoons version of Gears of War we got with 4 and 5, is nice to hear.
But, as someone who writes books, and has had a little experience in the games industry (I really need to emphasize the little part, right there) I can tell you that this is a big deal. They’ve put the main trilogy on hold to give the players exactly what they want. They had a plan to make a new trilogy, but by the second game it was clear that it wasn’t vibing with players, and so they’ve taken the nuclear option and created the exact game that they know their core audience would want. That’s a big deal, because not only is there already a lot of time/effort/money sunk into this new trilogy, but there’s the in-house ideologues who would be resistant to such a move.
“A game with two straight male characters?! And the lead is white?!?!”
There’s no ideology at play here except cold hard cash, and Microsoft want as much of it as possible. This is a prequel, set 14 years before the first Gears of War… we already know who dies and who doesn’t, we already know how it ends. All that matters here is the journey, and so the journey has to be worth it. The dev’s know they fucked up with Gears of War 4 & Gears 5, and so they’ve jumped back to their original track to try to save what they can. It’s not going to be fresh, or revolutionize the genre, but it’s going to be tried-and-true, and you’ve got to have faith that they know what they’re doing by the fact that they’ve course-corrected this drastically.
Again, because (as of writing this) we live in 2024 and people are already sperging out with self-righteous fury over this… you can have fantastic female leads, but that doesn’t mean all female leads are fantastic. If you’re so focused on getting your message across, or just comfortably not trying because you’re merely focused on representation, then your story is going to suffer and people aren’t going to get your message anyway. I’m not excited for Gears of War: E-Day because it has male leads, I’m excited because it promises a return to form.
I’m excited for Gears of War: E-Day, but at the same time I wish I didn’t have to be. I wish JD Fenix had been born a girl, because then we would’ve gotten a complete trilogy, with a better story, and we wouldn’t need this random prequel.