Trapped at the end of history, where humanity refuses to evolve. Not even total nuclear war really moved history forward. You could nuke the world five times over and still the survivors would huddle around a trash fire and drop Monty Python references.

Every character in this game is LARPing. LARPing as Vegas gangsters, knights of yore, 80's boxing champions, indigenous tribes, and whatever long dead culture they can scavenge from the rubble and haphazardly imitate. Humanity is recycling old ideas, systems, and aesthetics. It's a world of pastiche, everything a caricature of a caricature with no original. One of the enemies you can encounter is a malfunctioning pre-war robot that shouts references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie no living person remembers at this point. That feels like a good summation of Fallout 2.

I don't know if this was intentional or not; maybe it's a just a consequence of Fallout itself being a pastiche of other cultural influences, or maybe it's self-aware. But the inability to move on from the past and create something new is clearly a theme they aimed for with this game, which is why the Enclave are the antagonists. They're the zombified corpse of the United States, and all that remains behind its dead eyes is the drive to rape and pillage the world and eventually, the stars. Fallout 2's vision of America is one giant CIA death squad squatting on an oil rig in the Pacific that can do nothing but consume everything in its path. These are the people responsible for the end of the world; they're a rabid dog that can't be reasoned with, only put down. It's fitting then that the final boss, Frank Horrigan, can't be talked down like his counterpart in Fallout 1. You have to kill him. And when you do, you may view that thematically as a final banishment of the old world, so now something new, like the NCR, can move the world forward and let go of the past.

But what are the NCR? They're just the Enclave from 350 years prior. They're directly modeled after the US government, except with some vague idea that they've learned from America's mistakes and are the better, truer fulfillment of its lofty ideals. But the differences are only superficial, and they'll eventually repeat those same mistakes (which is exactly what happens in New Vegas). The NCR has no industrial capacity and is relegated to scavenging and repurposing knowledge and tech from the old US. They never even had a chance to be different when they're so dependent on recycling America's technological, cultural, and political innovations. These are the people who are supposed to usher in a new era? It really portrays the world of Fallout as one with no future, where the same cycle of apocalyptic destruction driven by conflict over limited resources will happen again and again, because we are all haunted by the same failed systems. Instead of wiping the slate clean, the destruction and collective trauma of the Great War has robbed humanity of its capacity to imagine a future. "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."

This is all very conceptually interesting - too bad the gameplay itself kind of falls apart in Fallout 2. In a very thematically appropriate move, the developers reused the engine, music, and assets of Fallout 1 and stretched them beyond their limits for the sequel. As a result, the game feels pretty agonizing to play at times; fights can go on for excruciating lengths due to the higher number of enemies, and they get sadistically difficult. The map is bigger making travel impractical unless you get the Highwayman (which is actually really cool to be fair), cities are bigger and are painfully long and monotonous to traverse, and there are so many more characters, very few of which have the memorable talking heads of the original.

And in general, there are a lot of design changes that make this game feel not as well-crafted as the first, like the Temple of Trials replacing the quick and simple cave start in Fallout 1, or the removal of the time limit getting rid of the focusing sense of urgency the original had. The main quest is longer and more padded out too, taking about twice as long to complete without really justifying the length. Fallout 2 had to be bigger than the first so it could feel like a proper sequel (which, in the 90s, also meant making the game harder), and because of that I think it highlighted how archaic and simple the engine was - a fact that actually didn't feel as noticeable to me while playing Fallout 1. It probably didn't help that they also released this game only a year after the first, which is pretty apparent given how unfinished and stapled together the game can feel in places. San Francisco is probably the best example of how this game is barely functional at times.

What ultimately makes this game a good sequel to me though is that it adds so much depth to the story told by the original. Fallout 2 is the exact nightmarish outcome the Master wanted to avert. He was the only one who saw the world's stagnation clearly and had a true vision of another way, one that required humanity to essentially shed its old skin. Forcing us to Evolve, literally and figuratively, to end this inescapable stagnation and get history moving forward once more. By assimilating every single person into the Unity, there would be no more conflict - just peaceful redistribution of resources based on our shared goals. We could finally see ourselves as something new, unburdened by humanity's past.

But it doesn't matter whether you think he was right or wrong. The Master's plan was doomed from the start and would have lead to its own Children of Men style world, as we find out in Fallout 1. And you can't cling on to the disappointments of history and wish things could have been different. You have to keep living and have enough faith to try and build something new and different, like Marcus in Broken Hills - even if there's a slim chance it will work out.