Chimera Squad Agent Analysis: Godmother

Godmother is another first-run starting team member, and notably is treated by the tutorial and pre-release material as the squad leader. The gameplay doesn't enforce this, since the game is designed with replayability in mind and you can have any four different agents in your initial squad, but the vibe is clearly there, and interesting on a number of levels; I'll be coming back to this toward the end of the post.

Also interesting is that Godmother is the only completely normal human with no altered biology, techno-wizardry, or psionic powers to her name. Godmother keeps up with all these superhuman agents by pushing herself to her limits; this is one of the only pieces of media I've seen to actually legitimately treat a 'normal' as meaningfully relevant when placed among superhuman forces without any weird, janky caveats. Godmother really is just very competent and hard-working, enough so that being a baseline human with a shotgun and little else is plenty. Indeed, she's actually one of the stronger agents, and it feels surprisingly natural!

On the note of the Shotgun, Godmother is pretty directly inheriting the will of Assaults and Rangers from the prior games, not only by carrying a Shotgun but in broader terms. Indeed, it's worth pointing out that the internal file designation for Godmother is 'Ranger': yes, the devs intended Godmother to be a continuation of the Assault/Ranger concept. Shotguns themselves are pretty much exactly as they were in XCOM 2; behavior of losing Aim at a distance while gaining it up close, same base damage. The primary significant change is, as I noted with Verge, that in Chimera Squad crit only rarely ranges above +1 damage, and Shotguns are no exception. Correlated to that is that Shotguns no longer have innate crit chance, though due the to prior you barely miss it.

Unlike XCOM 2, Shotguns don't have Standard Damage For A Serious Weapon; in Chimera Squad, all the competition does less damage than a Shotgun. This gives Godmother a non-trivial edge over most of the other agents, and Chimera Squad's design is sufficiently oriented toward close-quarters combat the Aim penalty at longer ranges is less impactful than in XCOM 2. There's a case to be made that Shotguns are in fact simply the best weapon in Chimera Squad, though ultimately it's by a small enough margin I don't feel it's particularly decisive in regards to overall agent quality; among other points, Chimera Squad's tuning of enemy HP isn't designed to emphasize the difference the way XCOM 2's early game HP tuning is (on higher difficulties) designed to make Rifle weakness stand out.

That is, at the beginning of XCOM 2 on its upper 2 difficulties, ADVENT Troopers have 4 HP and so will sometimes survive a hit from a Rifle but never from a Shotgun, Sniper Rifle, or Cannon, and ADVENT Officers have 7 HP and so will be taken out in 2 hits by those weapons (Or potentially 1 hit if critting) while a pair of Rifle shots will sometimes leave them on 1 HP and a Rifle critting simply can't kill an Officer. In Chimera Squad, early enemy HP tuning is a bit variable based on Investigation, but only Progeny Thralls have the 4 HP necessary for it to be true that a Shotgun to be an assured kill while the weaker weapons can sometimes leave the Thrall intact; other enemies have HP (Plus Armor, in some cases) values that mean no weapon is an assured kill, and early examples of relatively tough enemies don't necessarily stop at the 6 HP that also gives Shotguns a bit of an immediate edge. (eg Progeny Brutes have 7 HP on all difficulties, and so a Shotgun initially can't down them in one hit unless it both high-rolls and crits)

More generally, Chimera Squad's design puts less emphasis on such precise math in the first place. For example, in the Breach Phase the highest priorities are stopping enemies from shooting and from taking particularly problematic Alert actions; say you put Godmother in slot 4 for whatever reason, and by the time it's her turn there's one Aggressive enemy remaining with 1 HP, and there's also a Surprised Thrall Godmother will of course one-shot if she points her Shotgun at them. Unless Godmother's chance to hit the Aggressive enemy is pretty bad, you're probably going to have her shoot the Aggressive enemy anyway. This kind of principle continues post-Breach; it's often better to finish a weakened enemy who will act right after Godmother than it is to instantly wipe out a full-HP Thrall who won't act until all your other agents have taken their turns, even if Godmother's damage is noticeably overkill on the weakened enemy.

As such, while Shotguns probably are the best weapon, and I do find it unfortunate the game didn't make the balance of the weapons more even, I ultimately feel it's pretty unimportant. This is actually one of the things I like about Chimera Squad's design; XCOM 2 being more conscious of the impact of its math choices than its predecessor is an improvement to the design, but I tend to feel it's better design if a game manages to work such that these types of math points aren't primary drivers of player choices in the first place. 'Who is a priority target?' is fundamentally more interesting a decision than 'which target will maximize my damage output/maximize how many enemies I kill for the actions?' and such 'maximize my numbers' models of design often end up with everything converging on same-y gameplay: instead of looking at your options and picking one that seems suited to the situation, you end up discarding various options as irrelevant (Because their numbers are 5% lower than some other option) and basically just repeating a limited range of actions with little regard to the situation, even if the game technically has a very wide range of possible actions to perform and a wide variety of threats that could theoretically call for different answers.

So it's nice that Chimera Squad, instead of trying to stick to XCOM 2's approach of being very conscious of the implications of its early math, is successfully designed so the early math is actually pretty low in the hierarchy of 'things the player needs to think about when deciding how to resolve a situation'.

Anyway, Godmother's baselines.

Base Stats

8 HP (10 on the easiest difficulty)
65 Aim (75 on the easiest difficulty)
12 Mobility
40 Will (50 on the easiest difficulty)

Additionally, the easiest difficulty provides +15 passive crit chance, raises the crit chance bonus from a flank to +40 instead of +33, and provides a passive +5 Defense.

Compared to Verge, Godmother is tougher and faster, but has less Will. (This weakness doesn't come up very often, note; in most situations, her stats really are just better) Godmother is in fact one of the fastest agents in your roster: Verge's 10 Mobility is actually Chimera Squad's 'baseline' or 'standard' speed, contrasting with XCOM 2 having 12 be the default speed. Her durability, however, is middling for an agent: Verge was frail, and there are tougher agents than Godmother.

Possible Scars

Blunted: -15 crit chance
Hobbled: -3 Mobility
Sluggish: -15 Dodge

Sluggish and Blunted are both annoying, but are low priorities for correcting. In the early game, it's probably better to keep boosting HP on your squad first, rather than correcting Godmother's Scar(s).

Hobbled is crippling for Godmother. She desperately needs every point of Mobility she has to do her job. If she gets Hobbled, you basically have to bench her immediately until you can correct it. This is true at every stage of the game, too: there is no point where she can basically ignore it.

Base Abilities

Subdue

Turn-ending action: A move-and-melee attack that does 2-3 damage to the target, ignoring Armor and with no chance to miss. If the target is reduced to 0 HP by Subdue, they're knocked Unconscious instead of killed. Some targets cannot be Subdued.

Godmother's unusually high Mobility and propensity for aggressive movement means she's one of the agents most prone to finding herself in a position to Subdue a target opportunistically. Unlike Verge, Subdue isn't specifically an important tool for keeping moving while doing damage: you shouldn't forget it exists, but Godmother has plenty of ability to fight on the move even aside Subdue.

Note that Godmother has no personal tools for bypassing Armor. Especially if you give Godmother an Impact Frame, Subdue can stay relevant as an offensive tool for surprisingly long thanks to Subdue being her only option for working around heavy Armor. Again, Chimera Squad is lighter on Armor overall than XCOM 2, but there's still real situations Subdue can end up being Godmother's best choice in terms of raw damage.

Scattershot
Turn ending action: Godmother spends 2 ammo to fire regular shots at everything in a cone. 1 turn cooldown.

Oddly, Scattershot only partially counts Ammo Items, increasing its damage appropriately, but failing to inflict side effects. (eg Dragon Rounds will add 1 damage to targets possible to set on fire, but Scattershot won't set them on fire)

Scattershot is a very niche ability. The cone of fire is very short-ranged and small, and enemies mostly don't clump up enough for Scattershot to catch multiple of them, whether you're talking over the course of combat or the immediate post-Breach state. It also still functions as a regular shot taken on each individual, meaning it can miss, has lower odds of hitting enemies in Cover, etc, and it absolutely has friendly fire.

One of the primary exceptions to clumping is that melee enemies will readily end up clumped by virtue of focusing on one of your agents. Unless said agent is Godmother herself, this will frequently mean Godmother can't take the shot without catching an ally. Another exception is that there are enemies that summon minions spawned directly atop them... minions that die if the summoner dies, making area-of-effect a bit pointless to turn on them.

That said, Godmother gets it for free, it can be used without worrying about cooldown issues, and Godmother is one of the agents best-equipped to get in position to leverage an opportunity if it does arrive. If this was an ability where you were picking between it and something else, I'd be a bit horrified, but as Godmother's basic ability... honestly, she's pretty solid just going around Shotgunning things. The fact that other agents start with more broadly useful abilities is vaguely annoying, but not actually much of a strike against Godmother.

And when the stars align and Godmother is in a perfect position to catch multiple enemies, it's quite good. It also gets better as the game advances, unlike some basic abilities, since it scales with weapon technology and gets damage out of Ammo Items, so it doesn't risk falling out of relevancy.

As such, while I think Scattershot's design is not ideal, it actually works out okay overall.

Deputy Agent
+3 Aim

Alpha Strike
Breach action: Godmother fires her Shotgun at a selected target as usual, but then her first turn occurs earlier in the Timeline and has her starting with an additional action point. 1 use per mission.

I'm not entirely sure how Alpha Strike intersects with Timeline construction (It seems to try to move her turn up 3 slots, but with multiple caveats), but generally this is best used with Godmother going second in Breach order. She'll usually end up going immediately after whoever was in the first Breach slot, and whoever is in that position always goes before every enemy. Whereas if she's in the fourth slot, Alpha Strike will often still lead to her being placed after almost every enemy has moved.

And of course in the first slot, all it's doing is providing that extra action point, since she was going to go first anyway. Don't do that. Like, if she's carrying an Item that lets everyone access a Breach entrance you want to use, and it's the final Encounter, you might as well use it at that point, but generally speaking you shouldn't have her in the first slot when planning to Alpha Strike.

Note that Alpha Strike gives Godmother an extra action point in her own turn, which is different from how a seemingly-equivalent Breach modifier works: there's a Breach modifier that gives agents an action point as soon as the Breach is over, allowing them to act on your first agent's turn, rather than putting them at 3 action points when their turn rolls around. (Unless they were first, of course)

Though on that note, Alpha Strike's own extra action point is more significant than you might intuitively expect due to a change to how movement works; in prior games, spending two action points within a turn got you roughly the same maximum movement as if you instead spent 1 action point on 2 turns in a row. ('Roughly' due to rounding oddities) In Chimera Squad, if a unit spends both action points on movement (Including actions like Subdue that aren't purely movement) they get full value from the first action point but only half value on the second action point.

The reason this makes Alpha Strike more significant than you might expect is that if a unit has 3 or more action points, the penalty for moving a lot won't hit until using their final action point. Alpha Strike means Godmother can perform a 1 action point move, then perform another one that's just as fast, and only the third and final action point will actually have halved movement.

To put that in more concrete terms: if Godmother does not Alpha Strike, she can Subdue an enemy at 150% of her base movement speed. If she Alpha Strikes, she can instead get to a flanking position and fire her Shotgun at 200% of her movement speed. By contrast, in XCOM 2 a Ranger Slashing with 2 action points would work out to more or less the same travel distance as a Ranger trying to get a flanking point-blank Shotgun blast with 3 action points.

So Alpha Strike's additional action point actually has a drastic increase on Godmother's initial ability to get around the battlefield.

And of course it's pure improvement over a regular shooting action, so there's literally no reason to not use Alpha Strike at some point in the mission. In missions that are only 1 Encounter, Godmother really should always use Alpha Strike without thinking about it, and in missions with multiple Encounters she should at minimum use it in the last Encounter -conveniently, the game tells you which Encounter out of how many Encounters you're on. (Notable bug or oversight: the absolute final mission of the game presents itself as a 3-Encounter mission, but is, uniquely, actually 4 Encounters. The game is otherwise always accurate on this topic)

Basic Training: +2 HP.

Godmother is innately tough enough I wouldn't necessarily prioritize getting her this Training over, say, Verge, but she's pressured to charge enemies and doesn't get Armor or much in the way of more unusual survival tools, so I place her as still one of the higher priorities on getting this Training done so she's that bit more likely to get through a mission without going down if things go awry.

Field Agent
+3 Aim

Last Stand
Passive: If Godmother should be taken to 0 HP and she is currently not impaired, she instead remains at 1 HP and immediately gets a full turn. Can only trigger once per mission.

OR

Flush
1 action point: Godmother spends 1 ammo to force an enemy to relocate. This does no damage. 2 turn cooldown.

Flush is... niche. I get why it's been modified the way it has, relative to its appearance on the Assault, but Flush was niche back then when it could be used to finish off weakened targets, and it's even more niche in Chimera Squad, not helped by the fact that Godmother is a close-range fighter who generally wants to move closer before shooting, nor by the fact that the turn mechanics mean you can't always have someone else immediately fire on the hopefully-exposed enemy, or set up Overwatch with someone else and then Flush to trigger it, or whatever. I'd generally skip it...

.... especially since Last Stand is outright amazing. In addition to the massive tactical benefits, it actually has non-obvious strategic benefits, in that Last Stand triggering means Godmother doesn't actually go into Bleeding Out mode, and so if you manage to finish the mission without her being downed again she'll only have a 10% chance of picking up a Scar, instead of being guaranteed to.

It's especially appreciated for a learning player, making it nice that Godmother is part of the forced first-run crew, making errors less punishing, but while getting better at the game makes it less likely to activate it's still by far the better choice and goes extremely well with Godmother being designed to move aggressively; she's one of the more likely agents to end up in a dangerous position as part of getting the job done.

Do note that Last Stand triggering actually changes Godmother's place in the Timeline; it's a proper full turn.

Interestingly, in the config files Flush is actually placed under Claymore's sub-section of skills, not Godmother's, indicating he was intended to have it. Which is too bad: it still would've been underwhelming on him, but it might've actually been worth considering. (Admittedly depending on what it was in competition with)

Special Agent
+1 HP
+2 Aim

Ventilate
Turn ending action: Godmother spends three ammo to do 6-10 damage to a target she has line of fire on. This attack cannot miss or Graze and will automatically destroy whatever Cover should be protecting the victim from Godmother. (Assuming the Cover is destructible) This attack cannot crit. 3 turn cooldown.

Note that Shotguns only have 3 ammo by default. Godmother is one of the better agents to pass out an Expanded Magazine to so she can Ventilate on demand even after a move, even after having fired on someone, etc. This also makes her one of the better agents to consider giving an Autoloader to, particularly when fighting the Progeny, due to Codex presence meaning she can be ammo-drained and then forced to move, where an Expanded Magazine doesn't help.

Ventilate itself is visualized as three Shotgun blasts, but is mechanically a single big attack; it can be used to overwhelm heavy Armor, for example. (Not that heavy Armor is much of a thing in Chimera Squad, but still) More importantly, in spite of being based around firing the Shotgun, it doesn't scale damage appropriately; its damage doesn't rise any from upgrading Shotguns, nor from giving Godmother Ammo that boosts damage. It will always be 6-10 damage before Armor, period. Bizarrely, it does apply Ammo-based side effects, such as Dragon Rounds setting the target on fire, even though it doesn't get boosted damage from Ammo.

A side effect of this is that Ventilate impresses a lot more early in the game, before enemies have a chance to gain more HP and before you have a chance to upgrade weapons or acquire Ammo that boosts damage. At base, its worst-case scenario is equal to a high-roll non-crit Shotgun shot, and its high roll is beyond anything that can be done with a regular Shotgun shot, all while it smashes Cover, has no possibility of Grazing, and has no possibility of missing, and in the early game even tough enemies are prone to keeling over dead in one Ventilate.

Once you're talking Master-Crafted Shotguns while facing third Investigation enemies, its damage can easily roll low and be worse than a regular shot, and even fragile enemies are often tough enough it's not an assured kill, with plenty of enemies being guaranteed to survive even a high roll. It remains an important tool to keep in mind because it lets Godmother secure kills even from long range or smash Cover so someone else can finish the target off, but its stopping power becomes much less impressive as a run goes on.

Unlock Potential Training: +1 Mobility and +15 Dodge.

Yes, Godmother gets to be even faster. She's one of your most mobile agents, period.

This is one of the higher-priority Unlock Potential Training options, as another point of Mobility can be the difference between not quite being able to get a flank vs getting it and so trivially downing a target. The Dodge is a nice bonus too, I guess, though fundamentally a modest amount of Dodge is kind of whatever.

Senior Agent
+2 Aim

Close Combat Specialist
Passive: Godmother automatically fires on any enemy that moves within 4 tiles of her, assuming ammo is available.

OR

Untouchable
Passive: If Godmother downs an enemy during her own turn, the very next attack against her is guaranteed to miss, even if the attack is normally incapable of failing.

Surprisingly, Untouchable can actually trigger during the Breach Phase. If you're taken Untouchable anyway and you can tell an Aggressive enemy's only option is to target Godmother, finishing off a different target can be a completely safe move that wastes their Aggressive action.

Also note that, while the game does tell you this in the description, an unintuitive aspect of its requirements is that it must be Godmother's turn when she takes an enemy down. That is, effects like Cooperation or the Motile Enhancer that gift an action point but not a proper turn cannot be used to trigger Untouchable. This makes Untouchable less powerful than you might intuitively expect; you can't have multiple squadmates gifting Godmother action points to have her Untouchable-tank a series of enemy attacks. It also means that Untouchable biases Godmother toward being placed early in turn order, so she can actually set up Untouchable before being attacked for the first time.

Do note that since Last Stand's extra turn is a proper turn for Godmother she therefore can trigger Untouchable after Last Stand triggers. They thus actually make for a very good combination.

Also note that it doesn't matter how she downs an enemy: shot them to death, Subdued them into Unconscious, whatever, it counts.

Close Combat Specialist is, of course, the return of the Assault skill of the same name, in its Enemy Within form. It was very solid back then, and is even better in Chimera Squad since reaction fire has no accuracy penalty; this means you can basically assume Close Combat Specialist is hitting in Chimera Squad, since Shotguns get such significant Aim boosts up close. Only the considerations of Cover and innate Defense on a handful of enemies make this assumption not strictly accurate.

This level is thus actually a fairly difficult choice. Close Combat Specialist, when properly supported with an Expanded Magazine, can allow Godmother to singlehandedly do terrifying amounts of damage with good positioning... something Alpha Strike makes a lot easier to arrange, by the way. Untouchable lets Godmother act as something of a tank for the squad, though, soaking attacks by deliberately putting herself in vulnerable positions while downing enemies, which can dramatically help with the squad's survivability. That's very valuable in its own right, often similar in value to outputting damage in terms of letting you ignore an enemy's turn.

I'd personally recommend learning players take Untouchable to start simply because it requires less familiarity with things like AI tendencies to properly take advantage of, but they're both very good skills, so for an experienced players this is really more a matter of personal preference or playstyle.

Principal Agent
+2 Aim

Final Stats
11 HP (Counting Training, but not other boosts)
77 Aim
13 Mobility (Counting Training, but not other boosts)
15 Dodge (Counting Training, but not other boosts)

Overtime
Free action: Godmother immediately gains +50 Dodge and +50 Crit chance, and gets an extra turn three slots later. The stat bonuses last until this extra turn is over. One use per mission.

By 'three slots later' I mean that if we start out with a turn order like so;

Godmother
Berserker
Terminal
Faceless
Verge
Etc

Godmother will insert herself into the Timeline so her bonus turn is the third one after her current turn, giving us;

Godmother
Berserker
Terminal
Godmother
Faceless
Verge
Etc

Overtime is thus an ability that strongly encourages having Godmother early in the Timeline so she can use her second turn to preempt enemies, hopefully taking out an enemy on each turn so they never get a chance to act at all.

The crit chance is pretty worthless, mind, and the Dodge isn't actually all that great either given it runs out after the second turn and the goal here is to take enemies out before they get a chance to act, but Overtime is still great just because an extra turn on demand is fantastic.

It's so widely, straightforwardly great I don't actually have much to say about it. You'll tend to want to save it for later in a mission, as later Encounters in a given mission do tend to be trying to be harder, but overall it's just great to break out anytime you're dealing with a tough formation.

Note that Overtime's bonus turn does not affect Godmother's future turn placement: it is a full and proper turn for eg cooldown purposes, but it doesn't effect where her turn after it will be placed. Her first turn decides that.

Final Training: Unlock Step Up.

Step Up
Passive: If Godmother takes out an enemy by firing her Shotgun, including by using a special attack, she immediately reloads her Shotgun for free.

This makes Ventilate, Close Combat Specialist, and Scattershot all much less burdensome to support. If you can consistently arrange for Godmother to down enemies with her attacks, you don't care that she's ammo-hungry and wielding a weapon with limited ammo. It especially impresses if you get it early enough Ventilate isn't falling behind on damage yet, but it's an incredible bit of efficiency in general and frees up Godmother to put different Weapon Attachments on her Shotgun rather than needing one or both ammo Attachments to stay at full effectiveness.

Step Up especially helps prop up Ventilate's late-game relevancy, where it's suffering from her regular shot damage becoming similar to Ventilate's damage and it's being relegated to forcing damage on targets in High Cover and landing assured kill-shots in situations Godmother otherwise can't set up a 100%-reliable downing of a target. Step Up ensures that Ventilating as a finishing blow won't result in problems from Godmother being low or out of ammo, where the only reason to consider not Ventilating is its cooldown.

This also slightly encourages tending to place Godmother in a slot later than first so she's better able to follow up on other agents' efforts and finish weakened targets. (As Chimera Squad prefers to tune things so taking out a target in one action is generally impractical, especially as you go up in difficulties and further in a run) Which is appreciated given Alpha Strike already encourages positioning Godmother that way!

Overall, Step Up is a cool ability I like a lot that unfortunately ends up in a bit of a strange place due to Chimera Squad's Encounter system: when an Encounter ends, all agents automatically reload their weapons for free anyway, and many Encounters are designed so that good play will finish them in 1-2 Rounds. So a lot of the time the free reloads don't actually do anything; among other points, Ventilate needing 3 ammo means you basically need to equip an Expanded Magazine on Godmother to ensure she can use it even if she's fired on something on a prior turn, and the mechanics of Weapon Attachments mean in the long haul you'll be specifically equipping her with a Superior Expanded Magazine. At that point, even aggressive and frivolous use of ammunition will still result in a lot of Encounters ending before Godmother can burn through a clip, no need for Step Up!

It's still appreciated in missions that use reinforcements, and also in the hardest missions in general, mind, but overall Step Up would actually fit better into XCOM 2 or especially War of the Chosen's design, where the standard is to be racing a clock and even reloading between pods isn't necessarily 'free'. (I say 'especially War of the Chosen' primarily due to the Lost: being able to Shotgun tougher Lost and trigger a free reload during your Headshot streak would be amazing) If XCOM 3 does the expected thing and uses XCOM 2/War of the Chosen as its primary design foundation, it would be nice if Step Up made an appearance there, but in the unlikely event it plays more like Chimera Squad I honestly would rather it not be recycled; it just fits awkwardly into Chimera Squad's design.

It's especially unfortunate it's positioned as an 'ultimate' skill, where the intention seems to be that such skills will be fairly high-impact.

------------------------------

Godmother is interesting for a lot of reasons, but she's perhaps most striking for how far the series has come on the topics of ethnicity/skin tone/nationality/all that crap, as well as gender.

One of the low-key background issues I had (Still have, really) with Enemy Unknown/Within was, essentially, you're playing a multinational project backed by the nations of the world, and... some pieces make a notable effort to reflect this fact. Your soldiers do get generated randomly in terms of assigned country, gender, skin tone, and to a lesser extent stuff like body type and hair, for example.

But a lot of pieces of Enemy Unknown/Within have a notable element of filling out the world with, and putting attention upon, what I am going to call 'Generic White Dudes'.

For example, Vahlen is a female scientist... the only female scientist on your staff, somehow. 'Generic' scientists show up in the 'ant farm' view and in multiple cinematics (Such as when putting a captured Outsider Shard to use), and they're all male. They're also more or less all Generic White Dudes.

By a similar token, you can see generic Engineers (The guys in yellow hardhats) in a few cinemas and in the 'ant farm' view, and they're once again uniformly male and more or less all Generic White Dudes.

And of course there's the other generic staff (The ones in Bradford's green sweater) who show up in a few cinemas to report things like a satellite coming into view of the Alien Base, and... they actually include some people with darker skin tones if you scrutinize the backgrounds of some specific shots, but they're still uniformly male and the ones who actually get to talk (Or otherwise be visibly pertinent, like the guy Bradford punches in the X-COM Base Defense mission cinematic) are uniformly Generic White Dudes.

This kind of thing continues even into other cinematics: the initial Terror Mission cinematic, for example, actually does have some women in the crowd, but it's biased to an eyebrow-raising extent toward men, and the cinematic puts its focus primarily on a Generic White Dude who stumbles while trying to run and another Generic White Dude who helps the stumbler get into an alleyway. (Before a Chryssalid comes out and zombifies both of them)

Never mind that your first Terror Mission can occur in Japan, Nigeria, China...

The Enemy Unknown DLC was if anything actually cringier about this. The Slingshot DLC has two missions unavoidably take place inside China, but Zhang is the only Chinese human we see at any point in them. (Because he is in fact the only human to show up, even though you're fighting in the middle of a Chinese metropolis. Where are the civilians?) EXALT is a mysterious cipher organization that can be headquartered in any of the Council of Funding Nations, but their troops are uniformly Generic White Dudes in silly uniforms hearkening back to a particular USA aesthetic. (You'd think Firaxis would have recycled the player soldier randomization routines for these guys, but nope)

In general, Enemy Unknown/Within paints a picture of the world that would kind of work if this all took place in the US in particular (The maps almost all look like they could be occurring somewhere in the continental US, whereas stuff like rain forests you can't find in the continental US get zero representation), while insisting you're playing a multinational organization fighting all across the globe.

All of which is the kind of low-key background racism/sexism (And other thoughtless 'this is normal everywhere, right?' thinking) I tend to sigh at in pop culture, where even when a work is trying to make its core cast more realistically diverse you can still tell the creators have their brain treat 'Generic White Dude' as a default to an absolutely absurd extent. (Among other 'defaults' that get treated as way more generally true than they are)

More specifically, it's the kind of low-key background issue that usually never improves any if it's present from the start of a given series, and in fact I'm used to seeing it leak into works that start out avoiding it.

So one of the things that surprised me about XCOM 2 that I didn't really talk about in my posts for it was how it legitimately made great strides on this topic: crowds were more diverse, camera focus was much more willing to be on people who weren't Generic White Dudes, and of course the player's generic Engineers and Scientists were just as varied as their soldiers. (It was pretty difficult to miss the lady VIPs given they're wearing really obvious high heels when being extracted) And War of the Chosen took these trends still further!

Which brings us back to Godmother: a woman with a darker skintone who is very firmly Not American (She's French, specifically), and is positioned by Chimera Squad as a front-and-center character who is the squad's leader and all.

I suspect some portion of players misread the game in this regard, as Whisper acting as Mission Control is the sort of role that tends, in video games, to be 'the player's boss', but Chimera Squad is quite clear that he's not 'in charge'. Godmother is, or Director Kelly if you want to look at the bigger picture.

Indeed, this kind of thing shows up elsewhere in the game: one mission takes place in City Hall, and...

... it has...

... multiple portraits of prior mayors who are very firmly not Generic White Dudes.

By contrast, Enemy Unknown/Within has its own examples of wealthy-looking folks in portraits in a few maps (Such as the itty-bitty fast food map), and they're all Generic White Dudes. So this is, in fact, a change, and a pleasant surprise of one.

A related point that caught me very off guard is the consideration of civilians. I'd gone into Chimera Squad figuring that sure, the player's squad would include a Sectoid and all, and maybe there'd be some plot-focused 'NPC' aliens (Such as the Sectoid newscaster), but the gameplay civilians would probably be 100% human, or maybe include hybrids. This is the kind of thing I'm used to seeing from games with Generic NPC Gameplay Elements: that regardless of what all the core cast are, the faceless masses tend to thoughtlessly stick to the same memes of normality.

So it was a very pleasant surprise to see that Chimera Squad's generic civilians in missions include not only humans and hybrids but Sectoids, Mutons, and even Vipers! (I love the civilian Vipers in business suits) And the civilian clothing is a nice mix of 'normal human clothing, but made to fit a non-human form' and bits like the thing I pointed out in Verge's post of Sectoids not wearing shoes at all and instead preferring some kind of foot wrapping. Usually when I see pop culture explore the topic of clothing on aliens, it sticks firmly to one or the other: that either the aliens only wear human-style clothing, or the artists clearly strive to avoid any possibility of it looking like they're wearing human clothing, both of which are dissonant to me. Chimera Squad having Sectoids mostly wear the kind of stuff humans wear, but with some exceptions, makes perfect sense coming from bipedal humanoids who nonetheless have notable divergences from the general human form.

It's especially nice that the game itself doesn't make a big thing out of all these things, it just does them.

Godmother herself is a fairly straightforward character, a no-nonsense sort who is fairly focused on getting the job done and doing it well. In and of itself this is piece doesn't really stand out, but how it's fit into the larger writing is actually pretty unusual.

Thing is, usually when I see pop culture (Of any kind) include a clear No Nonsense Character alongside goofier characters (It should be explicitly noted that in Chimera Squad several of your agents are jokesters), the work in question is clearly drawing a line in the sand between 'no nonsense people' and 'people who goof off' and firmly siding with one of these against the other and wanting the audience to agree with the work on which side's position is more correct. Such works generally do their best to tar and feather one position, where the work wants the audience to think that being No Nonsense or a Class Clown (Whichever the work is siding against) is outright a moral failing, not a difference of personality or even more specifically contextually-inappropriate. (That is, it won't be 'the Class Clown really shouldn't be doing their shenanigans at a funeral', but rather 'the Class Clown goofing off is inherently bad no matter the context')

This is so normalized it took me a while to realize that... Chimera Squad doesn't actually do it! Like yeah there's moments where Godmother plays off one of the more goofball agents in a manner that makes it clear they disagree about how to go about things, but there's no 'moral lesson' being pushed at the audience about one of the two having the 'correct' viewpoint or behavioral style. It's made clear that Godmother being a no-nonsense sort is just how she is -not an ideal to aspire to, not an oppressive quality to shun- and Chimera Squad is perfectly fine with that and sees no need to push the idea she should change, nor does it feel such a need on the reverse end.

In and of itself this is a pleasant surprise, but it's especially worth pointing this out in the context of Chimera Squad's overall pro-diversity framework. I've seen quite a few works that insist we need to be more accepting of others and their differences and so on and so forth that nonetheless walk right into either trying to convince the audience that No Nonsense people are evil bad jerkfaces who should stop being that way or trying to convince the audience that Class Clown Jokesters are irresponsible bad jerkfaces who should stop being that way, and either way it's a noticeable crack in the 'we should accept others' argument, demanding conformity of personality for... no clear reason, frankly. Chimera Squad actually extending 'we should embrace diversity' to this aspect of personality is a surprising bit of philosophical consistency!

It's impressive how thoroughly consistent Chimera Squad is on these kinds of points: even works made literally by a single individual (eg many webcomics) regularly fail to have this kind of coherency, let alone works like Chimera Squad where there's 50~ people explicitly listed in the credits. And it's an admirable set of topics to be consistent on, even better!

It's all a happy surprise.

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Next time, we move on to another of your forced-first-run agents: Cherub.

See you then.