Some thoughts about Zero Parades
Warning: This article has spoilers. Read only if you don't plan on playing the game.
First things first: I'm not taking into consideration any of the debacle regarding ZA/UM (the company) with ZA/UM (the former collective). Regardless of the issues with Kurvitz, other people worked on Disco Elysium, and some of them are still in the company. Still, I feel that's partially what held this game back, as it is not Disco Elysium, it's not even the same world as Disco Elysium (as far as I know), but it still tries very much to be Disco Elysium. And that's the issue, I guess: it has potential, it has some great moments, but it also carries a lot of mediocrity, and it is, at times, too pretentious. It feels like lots of different things glued together, trying to make some sense, instead of one whole package. It wouldn't surprise me if this is due to the issues with the studio management and pressure on the devs.
Anyway, I digress. I like this game, but I also feel underwhelmed by it. It's a game about colonialism, old and new, and how it affects an ex-colony's daily and political life. Portofiro was part of La Luz, a "technofascist empire" — words that some characters love repeating until it loses all meaning, without giving any context about what they mean — that got independent, then it had a dictator that flirted with communism — here represented by the Superbloc, a group of communist nations — and market liberalism — the domain of EMTERR, "L'Empire Sans Territoire", a bank-corporation that has no land but still runs multiple countries indirectly through the financial system.
The game was definitely inspired by Latin America1, especially after you see Portuguese and Spanish being frequently used, and it mimics a bit of the region's history — I can straight-away think of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and Perón in Argentina as inspirations for Nestor, Portofiro's former dictator now in exile, and his "Nestorismo". I believe the company used Spanish native-speakers for the VO, which is cool, but there are two issues I noticed here:
(a) Not all Spanish accents are the same, and I can definitely hear a difference between some of them, like Argentine Spanish and Castellano/European Spanish, and I guess I heard something that sounded like a Colombian accent2. And this sucks, because a small ex-colony that's been independent for a few generations would coalesce into a unified accent, and not preserve characteristics from people brought over by their former colonizer. This also leads to Portuguese words being pronounced with Spanish phonetics, kinda wasting the potential of melding both accents together3. Also, there's a character who's Portofiran native (as far as I understand) but has a Russian accent, which totally threw me off this whole thing.
(b) The voice acting... is not that great. It isn't bad or anything, but it doesn't get to the Disco Elysium level of delivery. With the exception of a few characters — like Melita, Karolina, and Dr. Gonza, to mention a few — the rest is... just there. The main character herself is a weird one, because she has a very compelling voice; however, it feels like they tried to copy Harry Du Bois' tone, but ended up sounding indifferent, stoic, or detached, which is weird because a lot of dialogue options are very lively and expressive. So, I'm not sure what happened there.
Regarding the story, it's also a mixed bag: I started not caring about it that much, then it becomes interesting, and then it ends very interestingly. But the execution is flawed to a fault. The main plotline I feel it was nicely designed: the player takes the role of CASCADE, an operant for the Operant Bureau — the Superbloc's spy agency, also known as the "Opera" — who was in Portofiro five years before the game started, but had her whole operation blown out by the Weeping Eye — basically, La Luz' secret police — which led her to be put on the "freezer" (figuratively) by the Opera. Now she's back on Portofiro because there's something big going on, and the operant sent there can't deal with it on his own. When CASCADE arrives, she has no idea what her assignment is and the other operant is in a vegetative state.
The plot twists this questline threw at me really got me by surprise: at first, CASCADE has no idea of what's going on or who to trust; then, little by little, she uncovers what happened to her former friends/assets in the city five years before; at the same time, she uncovers there's a big secret meeting that's going to take place in Portofiro between La Luz, EMTERR, and some important Portofiran figures; then she discovers the minister of mass culture from La Luz, the "Grand Lich" — a very powerful politician that many have no idea what he looks like — will be personally present. In the end, her assignment becomes "Kill the Grand Lich". Why? Because despite Portofiro being independent, it became a cultural slave of La Luz, losing its own culture and industry, and now relying on illegally imported bootleg products. La Luz is having some sort of "cultural victory" here, and the Superbloc isn't too happy about that4.
Each of CASCADE's former friends/assets, and the new ones, have their own storylines to follow, and they are all pretty good, I'd say. However, the pacing — along with the main plotline — is very wonky, with things escalating in a satisfactory way and then hitting a wall, where you have to do some busywork around the city in less-than-interesting side quests until events align and stuff start progressing again. I understand it's hard to create a good pacing in a game like this, but sometimes I got so frustrated by how unevenly everything progressed that I just wanted to rush the game and be done with it.
The technology in this world has a curious mix: it feels very 90s, but at the same time, political exiles and undesirables are sent to mine rare minerals on the moon (and it took me a while to realize they were talking literally). One very important piece of tech is something not many people know about: a machine capable of "imprinting" one person into another, basically creating a copy of themself. This is something kept under wraps by La Luz, where it's been used to create copies of Anonimo, their founder, meaning that the whole political elite is made of copies of the same guy for centuries. It kinda ties, thematically, with the "bootleg" products now flooding Portofiro (haha), and CASCADE finds out about this machine as she progresses on her investigation. There's even a chance of using it on the vegetative operant, making a "copy" of CASCADE and bringing him back into the action — but not without consequences.
It's worth mentioning that EMTERR also has its hold on Portofiro — which started as lending money to the failed state Nestor created — and you have the chance to visit a literal secret prison they have. Even more, they are holding a high-ranking Luzian politician there, who wants to run away from La Luz. Talking to him, CASCADE finds out the imprinting isn't perfect, degrading a bit every time it's done — just like how images degrade on the internet after we make a copy of the copy of the copy — leading to divergent visions on how the country should be run. The Hundred-Eyed Golem, chief of the Weeping Eye, has a different idea of where the country should go compared to the Grand Lich, with both being the same imprints from Anonimo now wrestling internally for power.
I like how the game portrays political conflict because it's not black and white; there are degrees of complexity here, mimicking quite well how people and governments respond to certain ideas, and how each person involved has a history and motives that, when seen in isolation, aren't that outrageous — although their actions can be (and, most of the time, are). Fiction aside, just like Disco Elysium, the game explores very decently the consequences of political forces and superpowers meddling in everyday politics. I'd only say the political economy present in the game is a bit more shallow and, whenever present, can really sound pretentious, with lots of repeating terminology — like "market liquidity" — as if it means anything worthy of note without deeper context for the players.
In the end, when CASCADE meets the Grand Lich, she finds out it was all a setup: the actual Grand Lich disappeared (it's the guy in the EMTERR prison, and not even EMTERR knows this) and you face a body double. The conversation seems to suggest the Opera's leadership and the Weeping Eye are working together, and then CASCADE can decide if she's going to kill him or not. It doesn't really matter because he dies anyway, either shot by her or by the Hundred-Eyed Golem, who's present and ready to arrest and take CASCADE to La Luz to be publicly tried and executed. This was all a political ploy, a power grab within La Luz's political elite, making him the most powerful person/Anonimo's imprint there while blaming the Superbloc for the Grand Lich's death.
Writing it all here doesn't sound as exciting, but I genuinely enjoyed how things got turned around every time you thought you figured it all out. If the studio were able to hammer in some of the quirks and adjust the pacing, it could've easily been a great game with a great narration. As it stands, it's still a good game, but one that just tries to copy Disco Elysium instead of creating a new identity, and I think it loses a bit of its colonial theme as the story goes on due to that — although it's very clear that Portofiro is just a stage for superpowers to play around. Which still is, you know, a colonialist point of view.
And don't get me wrong, there's a lot more to talk about this game, as it does have an incredible cast of characters that are well-built (most of the time) with some deep backstory, but this isn't a review and I didn't play the game enough to see all the dialogue options (and I don't plan to). I just wanted to talk about the overall feeling I got after finishing it, which amounts to: it's good, but not great. If you read this and want to play it, adjust your expectations.
I don't mean to dismiss our filiprimos and other Southeast Asian countries, but I don't know anything about the colonization in the region — except that they spent quite some time under European rule — and their political history post-independence, so I'll abstain from commenting about it.↩
I'm by no means an expert in Spanish accents, but if you ever talked with native speakers in their own language, you'd definitely notice the differences.↩
I bet both Spanish and Portuguese speakers are familiar with Portuñol/Portunhol, haha. That could've been an interesting inclusion here.↩
Among other things, as La Luz is also trying to retake old colonies back, sometimes by force.↩