Mercenaries: Let’s Roleplay, or Do you Wanna Be a War Criminal?
I really don’t want to start an essay with the sentence, “I don’t trust the Chinese,” so I’ll make it a compound sentence and stipulate that that sentiment is exclusively reserved for when I’m playing the videogame Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. I also want to state for the record that I don’t trust the South Koreans, Russian Mafia, or the UN Allies…also in relation to the aforementioned videogame.
I wanna make that clear.
Okay.
Moving on.
I wrote an essay about the videogame Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction a while back, specifically how I believed the game could be classifieds as an immersive sim, and how fun it is blowing stuff up with cruise missiles (the “bunker-blaster missile” is probably my favorite way to blow things up because it sends out an impact wave before the actual explosion(seriously, it’s pretty rad.)) While I’ve been replaying the game for the 29th or 31st time (it’s somewhere in the double digits by now I’m sure(and it’s definitely a prime number)), and while I was working on that essay I had a lot of time to think about how Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction also works as a role-playing game (RPG).
I was hesitant to call the game that at first, mostly because of the history of RPG videogames.
Role playing games have typically been reserved for the genres of science fiction and fantasy; great examples being games like Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls, Dragonage, Fabel, DragonQuest, FallOut, and of course the Final Fantasy series. These games, and many like them, allow players the chance to explore simulated personas in fantastic and obviously non-existent realities. The main appeal of RPGs for players is because the in-game worlds are so dramatically different from the reality players actually occupy. RPGs afford players the chance to temporarily adopt new personas they may want to live out in their actual lives, or even just for a moment imagine a persona that they could be. This is an argument often employed by videogame critics as well as players themselves for the appeal of the genre. RPGs afford players the chance to encounter non playable characters(npcs) that can send them on new adventures, offer lore about the history of the world and how it works, guide them along on their journey, and even pay them for performing tasks. Likewise players have the chance to battle enemy npcs that can range from mundane human enemies such as pirates and bandits to fantastic creatures like as dragons, chimeras, or titans. All of these elements make RPGs a unique genre and explain why players have enjoyed them over the course of the history of videogames.
At some point, however, someone wondered if RPGs should be used exclusively for the fantastic and science fiction crowd. Which leads me to Grand Theft Auto…I mean Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.
We’ll get to GTA in a bit though, I promise.
Mercenaries is one of the few games I’m aware of that shifted that rpg dynamic to a “familiar” environment. Put another way, it gave the player a world that actually existed.
Or at least existed to some realistic degree.
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (henceforth in this essay to be referred to simply as Mercenaries because that title is a mouthful) takes place in a fictional military conflict in the Korean peninsula. Eschewing the actual politics of contemporary Korea, Mercenaries tells a story about a fictional conflict where the former leader of North Korea has been deposed and killed by his son General Song who has established a new dictatorial regime and is taking military action to assimilate South Korea into its borders. A private security firm(a.k.a. mercenary operation(hence the title)) called ExOps holds a meeting upon the news that General Song alone has a bounty on his head of $100,000,000 along with numerous smaller bounties for his top brass and lower officers of his administration referred to in game as “The Deck of 52.” It’s decided one of three of the organization’s operatives(mercenaries) will enter the field and begin hunting these men(and a few women once you get to the Spades deck) while pursuing General Song.
The player can chose between three mercenaries Chris Jacobs, Mattias Nillsen, or Jennifer Mui. I mentioned in my previous essay that I typically chose Mattias Nillsen, the Polish soldier who speaks russian. This is because he’s voiced by actor Peter Stomare, and I was a teenager who watched the film Constantine in theaters and loved his performance as Satan immeasurably. However, when I started a new playthrough recently I picked Chris Jacobs, the black former Delta force operative who speaks Korean, and who’s voiced by Phil Lamar.
Fun fact, Phil Lamar is a rad dude.
The gameplay actually begins with the character waking up on a transport plane, equipping themselves with a rifle, some grenades, and a Personal Digital Assistant also known as a PDA(think of an early smartphone without being able to call someone)it was cool at the time)). Once armed the player is literally dropped into the fighting zone in a machine-gun clad hummer. From there, the player is given a training mission where they’ll learn the controls of the game and capture the first card-bounty the Two of Clubs(also known as the donkest of donks). After this mission the player can head to the South Korean base to start a new mission, or…they can do whatever they want.
And this is where the RPG element begins.
Mercenaries is an open-world, sandbox videogame and apart from the main roads that are typically occupied with civilian vehicles, military transports, or North Korean scouts there are also plenty of side roads that lead to corners of the map that aren’t typically accessible. Exploring these zones can be one of the quickest ways to find bounty cards. The lower deck cards of each chapter (cards 2-10) do not require the player to work with one of the four major organizations. I can literally grab a car, drive around, and stumble across a bounty card at which point I have the choice to capture them alive, or to kill them.
Depending on where the player is at in the game (or if they use cheatcodes(like I did))this affords role playing opportunity because I get to decide what sort of mercenary I want to play. For example, I could try and keep the target alive. If I make this choice it means that I’m likely going to have to fight through a squad of dudes, and potentially also tanks depending on the target in question. And that’s assuming reinforcements won’t randomly drive by right as I’m signaling the helicopter to pick him up. Once or twice while playing a North Korean soldier shot an RPG at the UN Allies helicopter that was literally an inch away from landing. After grumbling for a few minutes and beating that soldier to death, the process began again. This isn’t the only way real events can complicate gameplay either. Every so often, I would accidentally kill a target and have to reopen a save state discovering to my horror that I hadn’t saved before the last three missions.
A question appears before me as I write all this out: what’s the benefit of taking the target alive? The simplest answer is that I get the full bounty rather than 50%. Given the fact that lower deck bounties can range from $50,000 and higher it makes sense to expend a little extra effort. Guns, ammo, cars, and helicopters are expensive, and I’m playing a soldier for hire.
Put another way, I’m here to make money.
And there’s a lot of money to be made.
The exploration and combat are just one side of the roleplaying dynamics of Mercenaries. It is an action adventure shooter game so naturally combat is going to be the primary way to play. But, there is also the “favor” system. Each of the four factions the player receives missions from has a “favor” rating that is determined on how much you help their end goals. And this becomes complicated the further along I go because several missions in the game involve hurting your relationship with one faction.
For example in one mission the South Korean liaison sends me to a Chinese controlled airport to rescue one of their agents who’s been captured and is going to be interrogated. The goal of the mission is to sneak onto the airport, catch the operative, and then escape without the Chinese army ever knowing I was there.
Here’s the thing.
I have never been able to do this mission without alerting the Chinese army.
Likewise, I’ve had to kill a lot of Chinese soldiers just to escape.
Like, a LOT.
The end result of this mission is that the South Korean army looks on more favorably and the Chinese, well…they stop responding to the memes I text them.
Mercenaries provides a system of relationships that the player has to balance and navigate if they want to get to Ace missions, complete the main storyline and, this is important, make all of the moneyz.
Along with story missions, small actions like accidentally killing a faction’s soldier (which is not an uncommon thing to do with the driving controls of the game) can result in factions no longer offering missions. Likewise there are civilian npcs on roads and villages and if I accidently shoot them, or purposely shoot them(hence the subtitle of this essay) it will reduce my “favor” with every faction. And this can be a struggle to manage as more and more of the operations involve sabotaging or outright killing other faction members which can result in soldiers shooting you on sight until you bribe them or perform an action that makes them like you again. This can be anything from stealing cars for the Russians, finding intel for the Allies and South Koreans, or destroying listening posts for the Chinese.
Or, again, cheatcodes.
Though the easiest option for regaining trust is killing North Korean soldiers.
Everybody always likes it when I shoot North Koreans…and that sentence couldn’t possibly be taken out of context.
The player doesn’t have to try and manage all four factions since you only need at least two factions providing you intel to reach the Ace of each chapter of the game. I’ve literally played whole playthroughs where I’ve helped everybody except the Chinese Army. The only downside for this decision was not getting to hear the main envoy whose voice actor James Hong delivered some pretty solid lines of dialogue(in english and chinese).
Fun fact, James Hong is a rad dude.
I’ve provided a lot of examples of choices that are available to players of Mercenaries thus far and tried to explain how they offer role-playing opportunities to players. Part of my intellectual fascination with Mercenaries is rooted in nostalgia; this was a game I played a lot of. When I started researching this game I found more than a few people who seemed to remember it. There’s some YouTube playthroughs of the games, some contemporary reviews on sites like Metacritic, and even several archived official reviews. But as I was researching for this essay and trying to find some nuggets of critical insight I kept running into the same perception by critics: namely that Mercenaries was a “GTA clone.”
Mercenaries was released in 2005, less than a year after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and it shows. Most of the still available reviews for Mercenaries demonstrate how high a bar that latter game set because almost every one begins, ends, or mentions somewhere how Mercenaries was clearly trying to mimic GTA: San Andreas’s model of what an open world game could and/or should be. It’s important to note as well that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City had also been released just three years prior to Mercenaries, and, of course, Grand Theft Auto 3 in 2001 rocked the videogame market with its unprecedented open-world gameplay. I’m giving Mercenaries credit here because I like the game and spent a lot of hours playing it, but should my reader take the time to dig into the critical discourse they’ll find a vipers nest of videogame critics who were still in awe of Rockstars arguably great achievement and reticent to give any open world game with guns the time of day.
And, I wanna be clear, I am not calling those critics out as fools. I remember playing GTA 3 at an all boys slumber party. I remember with fondness spending the evening fighting cops with my AK-47 and picking up sex workers to watch the cars bounce.
GTA 3 is, fun fact, a rad dude…of a videogame.
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction’s connection and similarity to the GTA series is important to talk about, and not just because of their superficial elements. Grand Theft Auto games were shaping a new rpg sub-genre, and Mercenaries was following the same philosophical goal. Previous rpgs like DragonQuest and Final Fantasy, apart from being incredible videogames, kept the role-playing aesthetic in fantasy settings and numerous videogame developers followed suit because it was a proven line to success. The idea that players would want to role-play as criminals in contemporary settings just wasn’t part of the cultural landscape of the gaming market. And any game about military personnel or mercenaries was primarily concerned with creating adventure-based gaming, or pro-military propaganda.
In short, there wasn’t a foundation for allowing and exploring moral ambiguity.
I do want to be clear, I am not arguing that Mercenaries invented the sub-genre of rpgs about criminals and soldiers for hire. My effort in this essay was to understand how Mercenaries used this subgenre for the purpose of creating interesting in-game designs.
Pandemic Studios crafted a game that, like Jagged Alliance 2[**LINK**] and GTA 3, offered players choices about gameplay in a narrative setting that allowed for a range of options, some of which could be construed as morally dubious or even reprehensible. Dare I say, even evil. Players can shoot, punch, or blow up anything and everything in the world of Mercenaries regardless of political affiliation. If a player wants to kill civilians and become a war criminal they can do that. You can level whole blocks of neighborhoods with carpet bombs and fire RPGs into the endless series of tactical assault cars driven by Chinese or UN Allied soldiers. Whatever choice the player wants to make they can make it.
The point of a role playing game is to role play. The genre is about providing a simulation that allows the player the chance to explore identities that they may or may not identify with in a controlled environment.
As for myself, I never chose a malevolent route.
I played Mercenaries because I loved blowing up North Korean bunkers with cruise missiles, or targeting infantry in a helicopter. In fact if I accidently killed a civilian I would immediately restart from my last save because I didn’t want to kill civilians. Putting aside the effect it would have on my favor rating, the civilians in Mercenaries aren’t cynical bullet fodder the way they are in GTA. They don’t complain about their awful families, they never make snide remarks about my clothes, they never affect as being egomaniacal nutcases. They’re normal people who run from violence reminding me that I’m a player in a warzone. I may have been a money-hungry maniac with a penchant for convertible sports cars and missile strikes, but even at my darkest, I never wanted to be someone who could kill an unarmed Korean peasant and feel nothing about it.
It was a choice on my part.
And, for the record, it was always more fun to hijack tanks from North Koreans than cars from civilians. Even if driving those tanks was a nightmare, they still could shoot rounds that would blow up jeeps in a single shot, and I always got paid for it.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
5.5.2025
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