playing more ratchet and clank and it's aged surprisingly well.... I pointed out before how much it's a satire on american libertarianism but I think it's well demonstrated by the plot of ratchet and clank 2, where: you are hired by megacorp as a mercenary to capture one of megacorp's missing experimental lifeforms, and you use megacorp's weapons to do it. in the latter half of the game, you have to stop the lifeform devouring the galaxy, but it goes out of control out of megacorp's own negligence rather than malice. megacorp turns its guns on you, and eventually you have to take megacorp down at their HQ.... again, using megacorp weapons
...I think what I love about it is that megacorp has a total, inescapable monopoly on the whole galaxy, to the point where they represent every single beligerent in the fight and provide weapons for all of them. and it did it like a decade before star wars tried a similar thing in The Last Jedi
...what I like about ratchet and clank as characters in the early games is they're both, basically, mercenaries without morals. in the later games they try for just regular space heroics with them cast as actual goodies v baddies, wheras I much prefer the moral ambiguity of the first three games
the other thing I love so much about it is that not a single character, ever, notices or comments on megacorp's monopoly. it is just an aspect of their lives that is never questioned. one company controls all weapons, technology, and the entire entertainment industry. anyway can you tell this game was made just as the Iraq war was starting?
I'm pretty sure playing these games growing up made me less insane by all the US propaganda that was around, because the 2nd and 3rd of these games just skewer it, and american corporatism, so well
additional notes about where the series has ended up: I mentioned it's become more about heroes v villains in recent entries in the series (note: I haven't played rift apart yet) and dr. nefarious has become the series main recurring villain, and he's not actually very interesting, and I wanna note this is cause they've forgotten what's so good about nefarious the first time he was introduced. he fit into the satire angle of r&c because he's a private entity, with a private military, who wants to commit a private genocide. this aspect of his character (an unrepentant and insane megalomaniac who uses weapons mostly because he just has too many of them to waste) has been lost
and it's the kind of character you see a lot in real life now, and it feels like ratchet and clank doesn't have the same satirical bite that made the series so good in the 00's