Georgy Zhukov, a Marshal of the Soviet Union who oversaw some of the Red Army's most decisive victories in the course of World War II, has a Ryu Number of 3.
Notably, he's the only Soviet Marshal to have been played by Jason Isaacs in a satirical black comedy subsequently banned in Russia. There aren't a lot of those.
Ryu Number Chart Update: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is the fourth game in the Call of Juarez series, all but unrelated to the first two installments and thankfully unrelated to the third (let's us not talk about the third). This game features Silas Greaves, an aging gunman and bounty hunter in 1910 Abiline, Kansas who's got some recollections to regale a handful of saloongoers about, the majority of which have to do with wandering the Wild West and putting lead in people who perhaps deserve to have a bit more lead in them. Mind, Greaves isn't exactly what you'd call a Reliable Narrator... but he's not an Unreliable Narrator, either.
Gunslinger plays with the story-in-a-story narrative in a few pretty neat ways. As the player character stalks through a brightly lit swamp, one Greaves' listeners notes that the weather must have been nice, to which Greaves responds that no, it was foggy—and the environment immediately becomes so. Paths open up for the player character to follow as Greaves mentions them. More than once, Greaves gets distracted, causing the story (i.e. gameplay) he's narrating to change, or, on one occasion, spin into worrying surreality. The best example, I think, is when one of the characters sat at the saloon says he knows how the tale goes, providing narration and scenario for the player to shoot through FPSly, only for Greaves to tell him that that's not how it went at all; this is how it went—and then you play through that.
(So yeah, this technically means that all of the stages are Greaves' recollections and tales, which means they're technically not happening during the game's narrative which is wholly set at the saloon—if they ever happened at all, is another issue—but seeing as no significant amount of gameplay occurs outside of his narrative, and at least some of the stuff Really Did Happen—including various non-Greaves bits throughout the game—I'm going to call on the Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. precedent here and count it while circumnavigating the best I can in the future around using this game for characters that only appeared in Greaves' recollections. If you have any objections, these objections are completely fair and valid and you can stop reading this post now.)
(Hey, you're still here! Aces.)
One element that differentiates Gunslinger from previous entries in the series is the number of historical Wild West figures who show up in Greaves' tales. As the game notes, it wasn't unusual for dime novels to turn real-life gunhandlers into celebrities and folkheroes, if it wasn't those slingers doing the selling themselves—and Greaves, for all the low regard he's got for those novels, is selling a heck of a story. The very first stage, in fact, involves his brief and ill-fated team-up with Billy the Kid.
And yes, all the Big Names get intro screens like this. It's awesome.
Caveat: Henry Plummer's appearance in Greaves' story is especially suspect, on account of that it places him in after 1882, about a score of years after the real-life Plummer was given an awfully tawdry corded necklace and instructed to hang around. Too anachronistic to count, then?
Maybe. I dunno if it changes anything, but (and this is completely baseless speculation, so don't you dare copy-paste me like I'm some voice of expertise) to me, it almost feels like a mistake from outside the game. A point for this hypothesis: There's a character from the saloon who's prone to interjection whenever he thinks Greaves' story has gotten a little too far off reality, and while he does pipe up during the Plummer matter, all he says is that Greaves got the location wrong, which you'd think would barely qualify as peccadillo next to the whole time thing.
But no, everyone's perfectly fine with the time thing, which suggests that it isn't an error—not within the game, at least. Ever read Umney's Last Case? It's a short story. Stephen King.
... But hey, maybe Greaves really is just making the entire Plummer business up, and that specifically is the reason it's chronologically out of whack. It's more than implied at the end of the game that Greaves has—at least at one point during the whole game—stretched some truth, somewhere, but the where and when and how much and how important go cheerily unanswered.
Also, Plummer has an appearance on-screen during a not-directly-related-to-Greaves bit where they explain who he is For The Benefit Of The Player, which means it doesn't matter whether Greaves is making anything up or not, which means this whole multiparagraph massacre was for the benefit of nothing.
I waste your time! I waste all of your time!
Anyway, Ryu Numbers:
Wait, sorry, Dwight D. Eisenhower? Like the American president Dwight D. Eisenhower? Mr. I-Like-Ike?
Yeah, there's a reason the framing device bits happen in Abilene, Kansas, of all places. Eisenhower—born 1890—grew up there, before going to West Point in 1911. Before the Wild West era finally sunset, Wild Bill Hickok himself, in the early 1870's, served as marshal of the city. Tradition states that the Abilene of that time was a town of wickedness and criminality, which Hickok did his utmost to restore to lawfulness almost singlehandedly in the face of repeated attempts at assassination. And yes, there was a shootout in the Old West style, with the grievances petty but the consequences violent and lethal.
The truth, of course, is a lot more complicated (and a lot more interesting—see Robert Dykstra's 1961 paper in American Studies, "Wild Bill Hickok in Abilene"), but it wouldn't be wrong to say that Eisenhower grew up with the specter of the Old West hanging around.
... Which feels wrong, doesn't it? Talking about the Wild West and Eisenhower in anything like the same era. But the American Civil War only ended in 1865 (which means we haven't even gotten a bicentennialsworth of not-enslaving-not-imprisoned-people, incidentally), which is where a whole lot of the Wild West's big names owe their production (gotta take out that trauma somewhere). And then Manifest Destiny and genocide (all the genocide) and the Homestead Acts, and paved roads and the automobile (and in the opening cutscene, Silas Greaves' horse panics when the car nearly runs them over), and then it's World War I and an uncountable number of fresh-faced American boys are going to Europe to die face-down in the mud.
That's 1917. That's only just over fifty years.
Horse ebooks was right. Everything happens so much.
(For future reference, the characters who you can almost definitely count as showing up even if Greaves is pulling the maximum amount of bunk are Billy the Kid, Curly Bill Brocius, Johnny Ringo, Old Man Clanton, Henry Plummer—anachronism or otherwise—John Wesley Hardin, Bob Dalton, Grat Dalton, Emmett Dalton, Bill Powers—or however you'd prefer to spell him—Dick Broadwell—Bob, Grat, and those last two appear in Ben's recollection of the Dalton Gang, their bodies laid out in reference to an actual photograph that was taken—Jim Reed—that portion of Greaves' story is confirmed true—Jesse James, Frank James, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and of course, Dwight D. Eisenhower.)
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