Defending Moebius: Empire Rising- What To Hate- and What Not To
Note: The opinions contained within this article are those of the author and are not to be taken as fact. Also, spoilers.
Considering that it’s been half a year since its release, you would think that the hype (good or bad) for Moebius: Empire Rising would have died out somewhat by now. However, as the months have passed, I can’t help but notice the hate it continues to receive in the gaming community. I’m here to answer this simple question: How much of that hate is actually deserved?
The Bad:
Let me just start off with some of the criticism that I believe is rightly deserved. Yes, the graphics are not the best. There are clear visual glitches, and I did experience a bug in Chapter 5 (I believe that has been fixed, though). Also, Malachi’s walk is quite strange, but that is thankfully only an issue when walking in areas where it is impossible to “teleport” (aka skip walking animation). Not being able to pick up items before you need them, causing you to backtrack, is a mild inconvenience, and contrary to other adventure games that I have played. This, I believe, was made to make it easier to keep track of items had the series turned episodic, a strategy which, unfortunately, did not turn out well in the creators’ favor. Overall, I think budget restrictions were the main cause of many of the game’s technical faults. Many complained of the story being incomplete and the puzzles being too easy, and I think those could have been remedied if there was a sequel (which I believe Jane was planning) and a better budget. The game was a result of a Kickstarter, and a larger part of that money most likely went towards the Gabriel Knight remake, since that game already had an established fan base and people would have higher expectations for it. The GK remake was not approved until after the Kickstarter was completed, and so there were most likely business decisions that had to be made on how much money was going towards which game. Moebius was a victim of the business and financial issues that often plague adventure games, but this resulted in a lesser product than what people expected, and so the criticism of these aspects are, overall, understandable.
Malachi:
Let’s start with the protagonist; Malachi Rector himself. Yes, Malachi is an asshole. A huge asshole. There’s no denying that. Some of the critics say that he is, in addition to being a general asshole, sexist. And you know what? He is. The one part I disagree with is that people seem to think he’s sexist just for the sake of being sexist. Anyone who read the intro comic could see why that is not the case. His mother was cheating on his father, and was horribly killed by a lion immediately after a tryst with her lover. In addition to seeing his mother killed in front of him, Malachi, or anyone for that matter, never got the chance to confront her about it. There was no obvious reason behind it, and Malachi, a person who is driven to find answers, was forced to come to his own conclusion. Children have a nasty habit of blaming themselves in cases of parental distress, and Malachi, as intellectual as he his, may have done just that. He came to the conclusion that his mother didn’t love him enough to stay loyal to his father, and so abandoned them for another man. Since he believed he was unloved by his mother, and grew up with a distant father (as mentioned later in the game), Malachi was made to believe that people are truly incapable to love, especially women, since his mother was not loyal. Is he right to believe this? No. But it is difficult for people who suffer trauma to not categorize those who have caused them harm.
David:
Malachi’s relationship with David was what most people consider to be the highlight of the game. Many felt that David’s character was boring or underdeveloped, and while I do agree he could have shown more personality, I believe his purpose was to balance out Malachi. Jane Jensen has stated in interviews that she likes writing extreme characters, and one could argue that David is just as extreme as Malachi is. While Malachi is cold and cruel, David is warm and friendly. They were meant to balance each other out, and at the end of the game, Malachi does seem to be on his way to becoming a better person, even if it is mostly towards David. It’s clear that Malachi needs David. He does, quite frankly, go a bit crazy when David is kidnapped (a potential reason for him threatening a woman with a knife and swallowing a memory card). His panic attacks worsen, and although Malachi is an asshole, this aspect makes me have sympathy for him. He had no one, and then David came along, who he connected with and received support from. But then David is ripped away from him, just like his mother was. It’s easy to see why this relationship is important to Malachi, and I feel like that aspect of the game is where his humanity lies. Jane actually released a short story called ‘Into the Fire’, which is a prequel to Moebius and talks about St. Armand and Mont Froi, two of the past warriors and savants mentioned in the game. This is actually a very interesting story, and even if you didn’t like Malachi, I suggest you read it. It serves to show what kind of person Malachi may turn out to be, if the series continues, as Mont Froi turns out to be more sympathetic and understandable than Malachi. It also serves as a deeper look into the savant’s ability (if you were confused by the ending of the game) and the relationship between St. Armand and Mont Froi (though I won’t give too much away.
The Women of the Game:
Another issue has been how women in general are portrayed throughout the story. Honestly, this game made me rethink my views on feminism. I consider myself a feminist in the fact that I believe men and women should have equal rights, but this topic can be a grey area that I often find myself confused about. I thought, how can I, as a woman, enjoy this game if other women continue to say that it’s bad? Is it wrong for me to like this game? It took me a good deal of soul searching to come to the conclusion that no, it’s not wrong to enjoy a game that others don’t like. Just because I am a woman does not mean that I have to have the same opinions as other women. So, although this opinion may be unpopular, I have had to come to the conclusion that no, I do not believe this game is sexist. The protagonist may be, but the overall message of the game does not come off to me as such.
The scene that I believe made a lot of people view this game as sexist was the scene in Chapter 6. If you’ve played the game or read reviews, you probably know the scene I’m talking about. To make a long story short, Malachi threatens a woman with a knife in order to get information out of her, playing on her vanity by telling her he’ll scar her face if she doesn’t confess to him. I can understand how this scene made people uncomfortable, since it was one of the more violent scenes in a game that, up to that point, had very little violence executed by the main character. However, the game tried as hard as possible to show you that she was clearly involved with the bad guys. She was vain, snobbish, and, from what we could gauge from reading her mail and interrogating her, vengeful. Although there could potentially have been an alternative to threatening her with a knife, I would rather threaten a character that I knew was guilty than one who was innocent.
It is true that many other women up to that point had been snobbish, but I believe that went with the theme of the game. After all, the woman we are looking for comes from high society, and many of those from high society do tend to be viewed as vain. That’s why I was actually very pleased that Livia Drusilla turned out to be Helene. She was the only woman interviewed who was a generally good, caring, and intelligent person. I think that those other women were made to be vain, just to show how much Helene stood out amongst them. True, she does tend to snivel a bit during the final chapter, when she, Malachi, and David are making their way out of the cave, but who wouldn’t? She was kidnapped, brought to a strange place, and made to find her way out with two men she barely knew, all while pregnant and worrying about the fate of her baby. As far as the whole concept that she was basically being used to create a better future for America by marrying the future president, no one was forcing her into anything. She was meant to meet him anyway, as stated by a newspaper article about an event they were both going to attend. No one was honestly going to take her and force her to marry Markham against her will. The whole idea of the Moebius theory is that things happen the way history dictates, and so, until the villains intervened, Helene meeting, falling in love with, and marrying Markham was the way things were supposed to play out. Malachi and David were hired to, simply put, ensure that the villains’’ intervention did not alter the outcome that was supposed to happen. In addition, I hate to point out a double standard, but if it was a man that was supposed to marry a female future president in order to help her, people would probably complain that the game was implying a woman could not do anything without a man’s help (just a thought).
As for other female characters, I really enjoyed Gretchen. I think her relationship with Malachi was supposed to be a play on that of Gabriel and Grace, in the fact that she wanted Malachi, but he wanted nothing to do with her romantically or physically. Yes, he treats her poorly, but he treats pretty much everyone in the game the same way. She sort of serves as an insight into Malachi’s life (as shown in Chapter 3) that we otherwise would not have known, as well as delivering a good deal of sass and wit that is so common to Jane Jensen games. Speaking of Chapter 3, the teen you use to solve a puzzle in Bethesda Square has been an issue. I can understand how people would get offended using a woman’s body to accomplish a task, and this was an issue that was not as prevalent in the 90’s, during the peak of adventure games. I’m not going to go into a whole discussion of how female video game characters are portrayed in general, but I do feel that adventure games have less of an issue of sexualizing females than other game genres. Moebius is not mainstream, and so the creators may not have considered the modern issues it would be portraying. Long story short; some people were offended, but that was not the creators’ intention. The author of the game is a woman herself, after all, and while I know there are plenty of women out there who are against feminism, I refuse to believe that someone with as much imagination, spirit, and creative integrity as Jane Jensen would purposely seek out offensive material. Jane has stated that she likes writing male characters better than females, since she relates to them more, and if that’s what she wants to write about, and it makes her happy, then I, as a fan, respect her for it. I, for one, do not care whether a character is male or female as long as they are a GOOD character.
Final Thoughts:
Whether you like this game or not, you still have to give Jane Jensen credit for it. She had not fully made a game since Gabriel Knight 3, and I believe, despite the criticism, she is still proud of Moebius, as she should be. She’s started her own studio in a time where owning your own business can be perilous, but she continues to persevere and write about what she wants to write about. People have bashed her for this game, but since when does one piece of work define an author’s body of work as a whole? She’s proved on countless occasions that she has talent, and I hope that a good deal of her fans will still stand by her, even if they did not like Moebius. Jane is not an old game designer, a controversial one, or even a female one. These are things people have called her, but the only thing we need to know is that she is JUST a game designer, and does not need to be defined by any unnecessary adjectives. All I have left to say is that I enjoyed Moebius, I enjoy Jane Jensen, and I am, by all tense and purposes, a gamer. I have realized that we, as gamers, can like what we like. And as for those we don’t like, well, those can just stay on the shelf, where we want them (;