Fallout 2 is bigger and more beautiful than its politics, it is a bizarre game in love with nuclear nature, nuclear humanity, and the intersection and eventual marriage of them through its hero, not left or right or even ideological, but solely destructive, barrelling towards a positive apocalypse of creativity and madness. I wouldn't say the game has been misinterpreted, as the surface level reading is quite obvious, but the soul of Fallout 2 is much more complex than its given credit for, and a lot of the criticism of certain elements of the game seems to come from a refusal to read into its core, and the insistence that the classic fallouts are fundamentally political rpgs; Fallout 2 spills its guts , while the more acclaimed New Vegas remains composed and dour throughout. No political game could rejoice in nuclear apocalypse, and that is exactly the joy and heart of Fallout 2.