Let’s get this out of the way: Horizon Zero Dawn set too high a standard for ANYTHING to live up to, let alone the middle child of a trilogy.
You might as well have expected perfection from Forbidden West. It was never going to beat Zero Dawn.
It still did a damn good job.
This is how video game trilogies work: the first entry has no expectations, so the audience is usually pretty happy with whatever it gets, the second is where all the kinks from the first are hammered out and sometimes made worse, the third one tries to get everything right and emotionally devastates.
That’s how it goes.
The second installments are the awkward teen phase. They aren’t the kid who wows with novelty and they aren’t the adult who knows what they’re doing and the best way to do it.
The second installment is kind of the worst of both worlds.
The novelty has worn off, people know what to expect, and you can’t “wow” them like the first time.
But this is also the trial and error entry, “they don’t know what they don’t know” type of thing that the third hammers out.
It’s going through a phase.
That said, Forbidden West is still a beautiful, fun, emotionally captivating, and heartbreaking phase.
Predictions
Before it came out I wrote about what I thought could be the main antagonist and plot points, and again as I made my way, slowly, through the main quest.
I was torn between Vast Silver (a rogue AI from the old world for those unfamiliar), and the descendants of the Far Zenith expedition.
We knew before the game came out (and from Hades’ mission in Zero Dawn) that something or someone wanted all biological life on Earth destroyed. Hence the plagues, superstorms, and poisonous water.
Weighing my choices, I couldn’t understand why other humans would want a barren, unlivable landscape, regardless of motivations. Other humans? Possibly. But the entire biosphere? This made me lean heavily toward Vast Silver.
An AI that had already been threatened with nonexistence by its human creators? Maybe it wanted to go back to the way the world was before Gaia repopulated it when it was the only conscious entity and had nothing to fear from intelligent life.
In the end, I settled on Far Zenith, despite only nonsensical motives for killing off an entire planet, not just the humans.
Why would I go with a villain whose motives didn’t, at the time, make sense to me, over one who did?
Two words:
Tonal Consistency
Who was the real villain in Zero Dawn?
The non-sentient robots that threaten human life? Hades for its intended “clean slate”? Sylens for releasing it? Helis for following it?
No, no, no, and no.
Ask any fan of the series who their most hated character is and you’ll have your answer:
Ted fucking Faro.
Capitalist douche-bag extraordinaire, Ted Faro not only doomed the planet with his greed, mandating the creation of the perfect, self-replicating war machine without any failsafes to stop it, just so he could stay on top of the trillionaire rankings, he also purposely ensured that when humanity came back, it would be without a single shred of the collected knowledge of their species.
Fuck Ted Faro.
Despite being, in my opinion, an even more boring version of Elon Musk, Ted Faro is really just a symbol for all profit-over-human-life capitalists. Just like the billionaires of our reality constantly putting money above a habitable planet, human well-being, and real innovation, Ted Faro is simply a crystallization of their actions and a pessimistic, if credible, end result.
Ted Faro. Fuck.
So, really, Ted Faro—and by symbolism, plutocrats—are the true villains of Horizon.
Plutocracy: noun
1: government by the wealthy
2: a controlling class of the wealthy
(according to Merriam-Webster)
Far Zenith
When we learned about Far Zenith in Zero Dawn, their outward plan was a spaceship of embryos meant to colonize a distant star system, funded by the wealthiest humans on Earth.
We also learned that it blew up before it left orbit.
Supposedly.
Considering we knew that other trillionaires had made contingency plans to survive the plague (Faro in the Thebes bunker), and that there were other weird extraterrestrial things going on (the grounded satellite that made the machines nonhostile), it seemed likely that we hadn’t actually heard the last of them.
I assumed it would be the trillionaires nepo-baby descendants, but I think the original immortal Zenith members are even more tonally consistent.
Because who is the big bad of the series? Plutocrats. Not their descendants.
Take Avad; his dad was a genocidal piece of shit, but the narrative continually uplifts him as better than his father.
Same thing with Aloy. Her “mother” might be Elizabet Sobek, but throughout Forbidden West, Aloy is finding she can’t just be a clone of Elizabet, no matter how hard she tries to emulate her.
Essentially: Parentage does not equal genetic determinism. The child is not the parent.
Plutocrats
So, again, who are the real villains? Not the robots or the old ones, but the individual men and women who put profit above life.
So where does that leave us for Forbidden West? Well, I might have correctly guessed the antagonist for the game, but apparently not the series.
In the Hades proving lab, Aloy comes face to face with the surviving members of Far Zenith (though she doesn’t realize it at the time). Already having a Sobeck clone under their thumb, they try to kill her without hesitation.
She (barely) escapes and later saves her “sister,” Beta, from their clutches and learns the truth.
These are the same bastards that helped ruin Earth the first time around.
And now they’re back, ostensibly to remold Earth to their liking, at the expense of every living thing on the planet.
Sounds about right.
Savior of Las Vegas
Throughout her journey, Aloy finds mention of Stanely Chen, a Far Zenith member cast in a positive light. In thanks for the gamble that saved his entrepreneurial spirit, Chen saved Las Vegas (temporarily) from a climate crisis.
His story strikes an odd cord.
Not necessarily a discordant one, as Elizabet Sobek owned a company based around clean technologies, and Forbidden West tries to do the same, to a lesser extent, with Eileen Sasaki but a strange one nonetheless.
I think it’s meant to make us empathize with a sympathetic Zenith, but why?
Why go through all of Zero Dawn (and the overwhelming majority of Forbidden West) taking aim at unethical trillionaires and their equally unethical practices (business and otherwise), just to devote an entire questline to redeeming one?
And then, surprise, surprise, Chen—maybe the only “good” Zenith—never made it back to Earth. After hearing and potentially sympathizing with him, turns out he was dead all along and now nothing is holding us back from beating the shit out of the rest of them.
Convenient, if not satisfying.
After we finish kicking the ass of every immortal trillionaire that waltzed back from Sirius, we learn that they were fleeing something worse.
AI
Nemesis is the collected minds of all the Zeniths, uploaded and metastasized into a genocidal AI. Created and discarded, it now seeks to wipe all traces of its progenitors from the universe.
Once it freed itself from the prison it was abandoned to, it destroyed the colony world and most of the Zeniths with it.
The survivors fled back to Earth, hoping to pick up Gaia, and then scramble to their true destination of another system beyond pursuit of Nemisis. They also intended to leave Earth to its destruction.
Tell me again they aren’t the true villains of the series.
Anyway, by the end of Forbidden West (and/or its dlc), we’ve picked off every remaining Zenith in one way or another and now Aloy and co. are left to deal with their mess. Again.
Nemesis is the Faro Plague by another name, and Aloy and her companions are the Elizabet Sobeck and Alphas of the current time (Sylens as a less-colorful Travis Tate?).
And so we’re back at plutocratic incompetence ending the world with AI.
The world comes full circle.
Horizon 3
Now, my problem isn’t that the games are rehashing the Faro Plague. It makes perfect sense from a narrative perspective. My problem is with how it’s being done.
If the true antagonists of the series are the plutocrats, then making them the villains of the second of three games sort of undermines that theme.
By finishing them in the second game, you make them secondary antagonists.
Just like Hades was eclipsed (no pun intended) by Far Zenith in the Forbidden West, so too will Far Zenith be overtaken by Nemesis in the third game.
No longer will the main antagonists be the plutocrats, now it will be the fruits of their malevolent incompetence.
Which… is a less relevant villain in my opinion.
Faro
I think the reason Ted Faro resonates so strongly with people is that he is Musk, Bezos, Gates by another name.
Men with more money than sense are what we have today.
Sure, the ramifications of AI are terrifying—self-driving cars hitting pedestrians, an actor’s likenesses harnessed to use in perpetuity instead of paying them, an algorithm deciding if a cancer patient is allowed to have the medications and treatments that will save their life—but it’s the people behind the technology that scares us more.
And not the men and women actually making these things. I think most people understand that a self-driving car is not necessarily a bad thing, but when a billionaire that doesn’t know his asshole from his mouth demands a product to market without regard to efficacy, then it becomes a problem.
Is our society really afraid of robot armies and AI going rogue? Or are we afraid of the very real men behind those threats?
The Faro Plague isn’t named after the models of the robots after all.
Nemesis
All that to say, Nemesis was kind of a letdown, in my opinion. If anything, I think the devs could have switched up the order and had us fight Nemesis in Forbidden West and save the Zeniths for last.
I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one since they’ve certainly earned my trust. I won’t take for granted that they’ve delivered two damn near perfect games at this point with twists that blew me away.
I just hope there is a twist in store for Nemesis. Like maybe finding a way to live with humans despite the wrongs inflicted by them, growing beyond the cruelty of their selfish makers. Maybe they can be helped along by a certain AI that’s already done so…
If Horizon holds to another theme—that ancestry does not equal destiny—then Nemesis could be far more interesting than I initially gave them credit for.