Based on critical reception alone, the newest Deus Ex will likely be a hit. And that’s with good cause. Human Revolution is a great game, designed to support a variety of approaches and chock full of the kinds of nuts-and-bolts customizations that make a player’s experience feel really unique.
But it’s also a huge title and the problem with that is players probably won’t see everything. In fact, it took a random tweet for me to find out about the worst thing in Deus Ex: Human Evolution. A thing named Letitia.
(MORE: Excellence from the Machine: ‘Deus Ex: Human Revolution’ Review)
Letitia’s a really bad part of a really good game. When lead character Adam Jensen encounters her in Detroit, she’s picking through the trash. It becomes clear that she’s an informant from Jensen’s police days and, as their conversation continues, she gives Jensen a few hints and a general sense of the mood of the city. Letitia’s horrible character design doesn’t stop you from exploring the cyberpunk world of 2027. Instead, she makes you wonder about how she even came into existence.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He09JaBVZdE]
Look, I get what Letitia’s supposed to be. She’s an informant in the Huggy Bear mode, the street person whose access to the underworld helps the hero get to the next part of the plot. Is she a have-not? Absolutely. Does she sound like the other have-nots in the game? Absolutely not. From 1:57 to 2:12 of the above video clip, Letitia talks about people losing jobs and homes, going on to say that the city feels likes its going to explode. If things were different, if Letitia was at all recognizably human, you could read those chunks of text as either a reference to the infamous 1967 Detroit Riots or the current discomfort created by the global economic downturn. The potential metaphorical depth that DXHR could hold in that moment gets squandered by the character delivering it.
Letitia talks about people losing employment and real estate, and it makes one ask if she ever had either or even any dignity. Did she make bad choices in life that had her digging in the trash? Or was she born in the gutter and never made it any further? If Letitia is supposed to communicate how broken society is in the DX: HR universe, she doesn’t need to look and sound like am homage to Amos ‘n’ Andy.
Why is this in here? Humor? Any mirth to be had from watching the sequence dissipates about 30 seconds in. No, the purpose of talking to Letitia is to move the player forward and give some hints about Jensen’s backstory. Yet in doing so, you encounter something really ugly. Letitia embodies a strain of racist stereotype that renders black people as less than human, as the worst that society has to offer.
Mind you, I’m not calling Eidos Montreal or Square Enix racist. What I will say is that the Letitia character swims in the same dirty stream of ideas that gave America the welfare queen myth and the mysterious black criminal often cited as an alibi in other people’s crimes.
The horrible broken English Letitia speaks is so far removed from any actual slang that it renders the character practically extra-terrestrial. It’s not from an alien planet, though. That slang harkens back to the worst blackface minstrelsy of the last century. Even the voice actor sounds embarrassed at the things she—even though it sounds like a man, at times—has to say.
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