Editor’s Note: We asked Jed Cruz to do a non-review about the latest Sid Meier Civilization game but with a twist. Jed explores the possibilities of winning with Jose Rizal if he was truly historically accurate.
Touch Me Not
The achievement for winning a Civ VII campaign as Jose Rizal is called “Can’t touch this.” That’s pretty clever, right? Considering how the other playable leaders fared (“Sailed the Seven Xerxes” and “Had the last Lafayette” are particularly painful), it’s a relief that the people in charge of naming the achievements managed to steer clear of any “rizz” references.
Rizal himself is well-executed in-game, with references not just to his role as a revolutionary, but also to his work as a doctor and a writer. He’s built to be a diplomat with an emphasis on cultural development, which mechanically fits the bill just fine.
Each improvement in a city is visible, even on the main map view
It’s disappointing, therefore, to be led down a path that largely diverges from Rizal’s idea of winning. In Civ VII, a cultural victory requires your civilization to dig up and display 15 artifacts from bygone ages. That’s it. And no, there is no diplomatic victory in Civ VII. The game presents Jose Rizal as a playable leader, but the rigid victory conditions keep him from actually being Jose Rizal.
A Narrow Mindset
Cities sprawl like never before seen in a Civilization game
Part of what makes the Civilization series work so well is its fine-tuned level of abstraction. Behind the grandiosity and the sweeping scale of history laid out before the player is a bunch of numbers that tick up to slightly larger numbers every turn. The illusion works because it’s wrapped up in such an engaging gameplay loop of building stuff that makes the numbers count up faster.
This loop works, and it’s as addictive as ever in Civ VII. This latest game holds immense potential in its changes to the series formula, with the separation of ages becoming a major gameplay element. Civ VII is split up into three ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern, and each new age introduces new mechanics and goals.
Where the game fails is in the parts where it tries to get a little too specific. It’s one thing to define the modern age scientific victory as a mission to the stars—a logical extrapolation of humanity’s future—but when the exploration age tasks the player’s empire to amass wealth by sending ships laden with treasure back from the new world, it hits differently. It flattens the world’s rich diversity into a single imperialist perspective.
Why is the modern age cultural victory so laser-focused on digging up old bones and trinkets? This decision is more baffling because the earlier exploration age cultural victory focuses more on spreading religion. This raises its own questions, certainly, but it has much more to do with how culture spreads than sending out a squad of archaeologists to pillage ruins all over the planet. It’s a narrow and oddly specific end goal. It’s not very Rizal.
No Revolutions
The problem here is one of expectations. Transformative people like Rizal and Harriet Tubman are presented by the game as playable characters, but the game does not really provide the means for the kind of transformation that these people are known for.
The mechanics are there. Rizal lobbied for the Philippines to become a province of Spain, for example, much like in Civilization terms, a city-state would have been absorbed into a greater empire. It would be fascinating to end the exploration age with a distant colony breaking away into a city-state due to cultural or economic strain, and it would be even more fascinating to be presented with an option to shift the player’s focus to that city-state for the next age. All-new goals could be presented, and new civic trees could be unlocked. A Rizal would fight for the state’s re-inclusion with equal rights into the empire, while a Bonifacio would seek its liberation into a new, separate nation.
It feels like it’s just about time for another remake of Sid Meier’s Colonization, isn’t it? Playing through a fight for freedom would have been a fitting climax, whether via cultural or military means.
Ultimately, the disappointment with playing as Rizal lies in the player’s inability to truly conclude his story. Without a diplomatic victory condition, all the consensus-building would have merely been a means to an end, with that end being the aforementioned army of archaeologists bringing back ancient pottery and necklaces from random hexes on the map.
What if it was possible to rally all the city-states that you are Suzerain of into a federation of nations? What if a player could set global policy through influence, and achieve victory that way? Wouldn’t it be a cultural victory to sway the world’s nations towards your own belief system, whether political, religious, or otherwise?
Digging up artifacts: Civilization VII’s only path towards a cultural victory
There can never be a revolution or a dissemination of new ideas—not even an abstraction of it! There is only the one cultural victory condition, and it’s not satisfying at all.
Can’t Do This
Civ VII is a very engrossing game. The magic of Civilization is still very much alive in this latest entry, and if you allow it to, it will still keep you up until sunrise.
There’s a Mortal Kombat-like quality to the pre-war faceoffs
It’s not perfect though, and in fact, it strays farther from perfection than its predecessors because of its odd specificity in some areas and concepts. It presents an astonishingly eclectic range of historical figures to play as… and it gives each of them the same set of verbs. Even worse, it further homogenizes them by making them compete for the same goals via the same means, as if a hypothetical template civilization existed by which all others should be judged.
The many constructable wonders of Civilization VII are rendered as beautifully as they have ever been
It might be too much to ask for to demand more variety in the player’s paths to victory, but surely it’s reasonable to expect outcomes that even remotely reflect the actual experiences of the leaders that Civ VII portrays. Rizal might be boasting “Can’t touch this”, but sadly, “Can’t do this” might be more appropriate for him with the game’s current state. Civilization VII is aware that in addition to being a doctor and a writer, Rizal was a revolutionary. The game should let him be one.
